Description
In this pioneering volume, leading scholars from a diversity of backgrounds in the humanities, social sciences, and different area studies argue for a more differentiated and self-reflected role of area-based science in global knowledge production. Considering that the mobility of people, goods, and ideas make the world more complex and geographically fixed categories increasingly obsolete, the authors call for a reflection of this new dynamism in research, teaching, and theorizing. The book thus moves beyond the constructed divide between area studies and systematic disciplines and instead proposes methodological and conceptual ways for encouraging the integration of marginalized and often overseen epistemologies. Essays on the ontological, theoretical, and pedagogical dimension of area studies highlight how people’s everyday practices of mobility challenge scholars, students, and practitioners of inter- and transdisciplinary area studies to transcend the cognitive boundaries that scholarly minds currently operate in.
Table of Contents
I Introduction: Area studies at the Crossroads
1. From Spatial Containers to Studying the Mobile
Anna-Katharina Hornidge & Katja Mielke
2. Challenging spatialities of knowledge under globalisation: Strategic responses to the neoliberal university and its role in entrenching the global immobility of theory production
Peter A. Jackson
II To be or not to be is not the question. Rethinking Area Studies in its own right
3. Area studies @ Southeast Asia: Concepts and directions for an emerging field of regional science
Christoph Antweiler
4. Rethinking “Middle Eastern” Studies post-Arab revolts: Analytical and conceptual queries and propositions
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
5. Rethinking the Americas: Entanglement and (De-)Colonization of Space and Knowledge
Olaf Kaltmeier
6. Are transregional studies the future of Area Studies?
Matthias Middell
III Mobility, immobility, and positionality in rethinking Area Studies
7. The society of betweenness: Migration and identities of migrants as identities in motion
Bianca Boteva-Richter
8. Positionality at the crossroads: Gendered lifeworlds, social situatedness and the relational production of place in the context of student migration to Gilgit, Pakistan
Andreas Benz
9. Red lines for uncivilised trade?: Fixity, mobility and position on Almaty’s changing bazaars
Henryk Alff
10. There and Back Again. Late German Repatriates at Eurasia’s Crossroads
Markus Kaiser & Michael Schoenhuth
11. Social (im-)mobility at the margins of rural society in Punjab: Vartan bhanji-exchange practices and coping strategies
Aftab Nasir
12. Margins or Center? Kokani Sufi Muslims between India and Arabastan
Deepra Dandekar
IV Theory-building from local empirical realities
13. Developing mid-range concepts in “global ethnography”: from researching development knowledge systems and systems of ignorance to translocal structuration of (gendered) fields and spaces
Gudrun Lachenmann
14. The social order concept: An invitation to non-normative ordering in research approaches to past and contemporary local politics
Andreas Wilde & Katja Mielke
15. Variants of differentiation in resources governance Khorezm, Uzbekistan: Is this a ‘mid-range concept’?
Anna-Katharina Hornidge
V Deschooling academic society: Pedagogy, practice and policy
16. The case for reconceptualising Southeast Asian Studies
Cynthia Chou
17. Positioning “Civilization blocs” within the Asia-Pacific region: Implications to the teaching of area studies in tertiary education in the Philippines
Elizabeth T. Urgel & Philip Michael I. Paje
18. “This area is [not] under quarantine”: Rethinking Southeast Asian Studies with (new) media
Arnika Fuhrmann
19. Teaching to transgress: Crossroads Studies and adventures in (?)-disciplinarity
Epifania Amoo-Adare
