"Identity and the Politics of Memory" April 2-4, 2002, Washington DC

The Association for Asian Studies invites applications from doctoral students in the humanities, social sciences, and professional schools working on all the different regions of Asia to participate in an interdisciplinary and comparative Dissertation Workshop on Identity and the Politics of Memory in Asia.

All across Asia - from Pakistan and India through China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia - social and political identities are being questioned, revised, contested, and reformulated. Self consciousness about religious, ethnic, class, and gender identities appears to be growing. Notions of subject, citizenship, and universal human rights are increasingly debated. Multiple, contextualized, historically rooted, and/or recently invented local, regional, national, and transnational identities are growing ever more complex. The politics of memory seems central to these processes as new and old constructions of the past - recent and distant, personal and social -- are reworked and manipulated for various ends. This is of course not new: images and understandings of "the past" have long been used to (re-)construct identities and shape social action with powerful consequences, individual and collective, throughout Asia - and beyond. What may be new is the growing recognition of the centrality of these processes, and come to a fuller understanding of their individual, social, and political potency.

This workshop is intended for doctoral students in the humanities, social sciences, and professional schools based at North American institutions who are working on or towards a dissertation dealing with these processes and their implications in contemporary or historical settings, anywhere in Asia. The workshop is limited to 12 students, ideally from a broad array of disciplines and working on a wide variety of materials -- aesthetic, archival, ethnographic, political, sociological, etc. -- in a variety of time periods, and in various regions of Asia. It will also include a small multidisciplinary and multi-area faculty with similar concerns. The workshop is designed to enable students just beginning to work on these issues, or well into them, to engage in intensive discussions of their own and each others' projects. It is intended to encourage greater cross regional exchange and will also explore possibilities for continuing contact among interested students and faculty. The workshop will be held in the days immediately preceding the 2002 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Washington DC. It will be held at the Wardman Park Hotel conference site beginning with dinner on Tuesday, April 2, and run through Thursday April 4, 2002.

The AAS is able to provide financial support for participants including: two nights hotel accommodations, meals, and limited "needs based" travel funds, up to a maximum of $500. Students conducting research abroad at the time of the workshop are eligible to participate, but funding limitations for international airfare will be the same as for domestic participants. Students needing additional funds to attend the workshop are encouraged to approach their home institutions for support.

Applicants need not yet have advanced to candidacy, but must have at least drafted a dissertation research proposal. Applications consist of two items only:

1. two copies of a current Curriculum Vitae
2. two copies of the dissertation proposal, or if the work is well under way, a statement - not more than 10 pages, double spaced - of the specific issues being addressed, the intellectual approach, and the materials being studied

Application materials (hard copy only - no emails) must reach the Dissertation Workshop, AAS, 1021 East Huron St., Ann Arbor MI, 48104, NO LATER THAN October 1, 2001. Workshop participants will be selected on the basis of the submitted projects, the potential for useful exchanges among them, a concern to include a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, intellectual traditions, and regions of Asia. Applicants will be informed whether or not they have been selected for the Workshop during the first week of November, 2001.

For further information about the Workshop, or eligibility, please contact Michael Paschal or David Szanton