Shaping Asia

Our point in case is an interdisciplinary networking initiative called ‘Shaping Asia’. It takes up the challenge of collaboratively grasping complex connectivities that shape (or have shaped) dynamics across Asia in diachronic and synchronic perspectives. This way, it aims at coming to critical terms with Asia’s positioning and circulations in a globalised world (Duara 2014). Such an understanding of and learning from - and with - ‘Asia’ (in fact, we prefer to employ the idea of pluralised Asia’s) in scholarly and ‘other’ worlds such as political realms, cultural production or social activism is needed in a context of highly asymmetrical relations in the rapidly transforming times like today. The methodological approach is also seen by us as relevant with respect to tracing and understanding historical relations and formations, in particular as we aim at transgressing scholarly and geophysical compartments that are rather common in qualitative research.