The North American Taiwan Studies Association (NATSA) will hold its next annual conference on June 12-15, 2015, on the campus of Harvard University. The call for papers has just been posted; the 2015 theme is "Motions and the Motionless: (Dis/Re-) Connecting Taiwan to the World." The deadline to submit proposals is December 31, 2014. Additional details can be found at the conference website, here. The formal announcement is below.
The NATSA 2015 conference, titled "Motions and the Motionless: (Dis/Re-)Connecting Taiwan to the World," endeavours to advance global Taiwan studies by setting Taiwan in motion, both in theory and in practice. To capture something of the dynamics and energies infused in Taiwanese society, this conference draws on an expansive concept of motion through which we hope to attract papers that explore and exploit the term's potentials and complexities. Over the past few years, those concerned with Taiwan have witnessed it in the midst of a series of fervent social upheavals of various kinds. These are both themselves social movements as well as responses and reactions to a set of other larger streams of economic, political, social, and cultural motions. As a set of islands historically populated by waves of immigrants and impositions of power, however, Taiwan has long been caught up in and composed of motion. The rich connotations of the main theme of "motions" will serve as a catalyst propelling us to place Taiwan in dialogue with the diverse geographical connections and historical contexts around the island and across the globe.
This conference invites scholarly works informed by the notion of motion--movement, flows, circulation, acceleration, stoppage, repetition, mobility, among others. Participants are encouraged to respond to current theoretical and methodological debates in their own humanities and social science disciplines that situate Taiwan within various trajectories and networks of motion and movement. Such papers might seek to understand motion located, embedded, or moving through a variety of different particular locales, at a variety of different scales, and from the perspective of a variety of different social and cultural arenas. Moreover, inquiries into "motions" suggest a methodological push to understand the links between the different locales (including those beyond Taiwan), scales, and cultural arenas where social change and interactions take place. For instance, how have demographic changes in Taiwan, as manifested in new dating, mate-making, and reproduction patterns, relate to Taiwan's changing socioeconomic status? How do transnational flows of migration, trade, and cross-border investment affect the circulation of energy and material objects in and out of Taiwan? How do policies transfer and circulate among governments and countries, connecting Taiwan to different epistemological flows and techniques of governing? To what extent can various Taiwanese stakeholders influence political, social and economic discourses both domestically and internationally? How might Taiwan's ties with the Pacific and South East Asia reconfigure our understanding of the island's cultural identity and natural habitat? What different sorts of motions might emerge from a focus on Taiwan and Taiwanese societies concerning water rather than land?
Motion also entails the movement of visual images, the transformation of rhetorical figures, and the rhythmic succession of sounds, all of which require not only human creativity but specific channels of circulation, production, and consumption based on material infrastructures. What distinctive narrative tropes might be created within an East Asian sphere of transculturation by and through Taiwan? What global routes and roots Taiwan cinema might have taken from the imperial projection of Japan, the strategic collaboration of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, the New Wave aesthetics of Europe, to the contemporary and beyond? What kind of challenges can popular music in Taiwan post to a putative, if not hegemonic, notion of "mandarin" market and "overseas" audience? We are interested in how Taiwan serves both as a contested nodal point and an active agent facilitating the flows across diverse textual, visual, and acoustic media. Tracing motions each with their own directions, routes, and velocities, we hope to shed a light on different ways of understanding contemporary and historical Taiwan that yield fascinating connections from within a variety of intellectual registers.
The antonym of motion, the motionless, is not only imbued with restrictive connotations such as slowness, stagnation, disconnection and immobility, but can also be associated with concepts of tradition, heritage, steady continuity, and persistence. Can these too have trajectories, routes, and the ability to connect different locales and scales both within Taiwan and between it and other parts of the world? Rather than being construed as a binary opposition, the dynamics between motion and the motionless can be the key to potential strategies that sustain or disturb capital circulation--both among privileged and marginalized social groups. On the other hand, in discussing ways in which Taiwan both desires and resists motions, we also welcome papers that delve into a deeper structure of feelings from which emotions, memories, and sentiments emerge against the collective anxiety about stoppage and entrapment in a new global order.
This conference invites scholarly works informed by the notion of motion--movement, flows, circulation, acceleration, stoppage, repetition, mobility, among others. Participants are encouraged to respond to current theoretical and methodological debates in their own humanities and social science disciplines that situate Taiwan within various trajectories and networks of motion and movement. Such papers might seek to understand motion located, embedded, or moving through a variety of different particular locales, at a variety of different scales, and from the perspective of a variety of different social and cultural arenas. Moreover, inquiries into "motions" suggest a methodological push to understand the links between the different locales (including those beyond Taiwan), scales, and cultural arenas where social change and interactions take place. For instance, how have demographic changes in Taiwan, as manifested in new dating, mate-making, and reproduction patterns, relate to Taiwan's changing socioeconomic status? How do transnational flows of migration, trade, and cross-border investment affect the circulation of energy and material objects in and out of Taiwan? How do policies transfer and circulate among governments and countries, connecting Taiwan to different epistemological flows and techniques of governing? To what extent can various Taiwanese stakeholders influence political, social and economic discourses both domestically and internationally? How might Taiwan's ties with the Pacific and South East Asia reconfigure our understanding of the island's cultural identity and natural habitat? What different sorts of motions might emerge from a focus on Taiwan and Taiwanese societies concerning water rather than land?
Motion also entails the movement of visual images, the transformation of rhetorical figures, and the rhythmic succession of sounds, all of which require not only human creativity but specific channels of circulation, production, and consumption based on material infrastructures. What distinctive narrative tropes might be created within an East Asian sphere of transculturation by and through Taiwan? What global routes and roots Taiwan cinema might have taken from the imperial projection of Japan, the strategic collaboration of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, the New Wave aesthetics of Europe, to the contemporary and beyond? What kind of challenges can popular music in Taiwan post to a putative, if not hegemonic, notion of "mandarin" market and "overseas" audience? We are interested in how Taiwan serves both as a contested nodal point and an active agent facilitating the flows across diverse textual, visual, and acoustic media. Tracing motions each with their own directions, routes, and velocities, we hope to shed a light on different ways of understanding contemporary and historical Taiwan that yield fascinating connections from within a variety of intellectual registers.
The antonym of motion, the motionless, is not only imbued with restrictive connotations such as slowness, stagnation, disconnection and immobility, but can also be associated with concepts of tradition, heritage, steady continuity, and persistence. Can these too have trajectories, routes, and the ability to connect different locales and scales both within Taiwan and between it and other parts of the world? Rather than being construed as a binary opposition, the dynamics between motion and the motionless can be the key to potential strategies that sustain or disturb capital circulation--both among privileged and marginalized social groups. On the other hand, in discussing ways in which Taiwan both desires and resists motions, we also welcome papers that delve into a deeper structure of feelings from which emotions, memories, and sentiments emerge against the collective anxiety about stoppage and entrapment in a new global order.
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