The 10th Next-Generation Global Workshop
Theme: Delineating Borders in a Borderless World
The Next-Generation Global Workshop (NGGW) has been held annually since 2008 to provide an opportunity for early-career scholars to present their research and to have feedback from an international audience. It has proved to be a pleasant and effective way for capacity building through mentorship of professors from different universities in different areas of the world. It has also provided invaluable opportunities for all participants to learn from their fellow participants with different perspectives and to deepen the understanding of various social phenomena issues in the world, particularly in Asia. Ultimately, the NGGW has served as a forum for scholars of different generations from various regions to build a common academic foundation by redefining Asia in the global context.
This year’s theme of the un-/making of borders connects the workshop with the planned master level joint degree program in Transcultural Studies between Kyoto University and Heidelberg University. With this new field of inquiry gaining momentum, the tension of rapidly emerging new borders and a supposedly borderless, globalized world appears as an ironic contrast. We can easily list corresponding phenomena such as expanding sentiments against immigrants, a rising prominence of nationalism, increasing protectionism and militarism, and crises in multi-national governmental units. These processes make the creation and organization of differences agonizingly visible. Taken as just another label for harmonizing difference, transculturality may thus appear as a concept already made obsolete by current events. If transculturality, however, engages such unruly and contradictory trends generated by mobility and extended contacts, it is an essential concept for understanding regimes of circulation and exchange, for shedding light on interaction and collaboration as well as dissonance, asymmetry, conflict, and border-making.
Transculturality denotes not only concrete objects of investigation, such as “hybrid” or “cosmopolitan” subject positions of people repeatedly crossing the borders of nation-states, the translation and putting into practice of governmental techniques developed elsewhere, or “fusion” food appropriating and combining culinary “traditions” from various regions. The term also and more importantly refers to an analytical method. We propose that by studying the flows of concepts, practices and people, we may shed light on processes of negotiating difference – not only in the present age when an unstoppable, liberal globalization meets immobile nationalisms and autocratic forms of governance, but also in the past when empires clashed or traders from far-away regions developed shared semiotic spheres through their contact. Engaging with the making and unmaking of cultural, political, social, linguistic and aesthetic borders, and by tracing the “global” as a connection of “locals,” we sharpen our competence and “literacy” to think, write and speak transculturally. The phenomena of drawing new borders may seem to enforce the nation-state but in their connectedness also challenge this conventional unit of analysis (cf. “methodological nationalism”). Key terms and governmental tools for delineating borders of inclusion and exclusion are “religion,” “race,” “ethnicity,” “culture,” “language,” “citizenship” and so forth, which allow the management of populations and a discrimination against others through naturalizing differences. Regardless of the incessant, border-crossing flows and interactions of people, goods, ideas, and concepts, the question of how new boundaries are delineated in these processes remains a significant question for transcultural studies.
日時/Dates: September 28-29, 2017
言語/ Language: 英語/ English
開催場所/ Venue: Faculty of Letters Main Building, Kyoto University
Proceedings of the 10th Next Generation Global Workshop
お問い合わせ/ Contact
京都大学大学院文学研究科 国際交流推進室
Office for the Promotion of International Exchange(OPIX), Graduate School of Letters
Tel: 075-753-2805 | Fax: 075-753-2796
kuasu.nextgeneration*bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp(*を@に変更してください。 Replace * with @)
