Heritage Across Borders

Organised by the Zhejiang University of Hangzhou China

The global rise of heritage studies and the heritage industry in recent decades has been a story of crossing frontiers and transcending boundaries. The 2018 Association of Critical Heritage Studies conference, held in Hangzhou, China, thus takes 'borders' as a broadly defined, yet key, concept for better understanding how heritage is valued, preserved, politicised, mobilised, financed, planned and destroyed. Thinking through borders raises questions about theories of heritage, its methodologies of research, and where its boundaries lie with tourism, urban development, post-disaster recovery, collective identities, climate change, memory or violent conflict. Held in the city of Hangzhou, China, Heritage Across Borders will be the largest ever international conference in Asia dedicated to the topic of heritage. It has been conceived to connect international participants with local issues, and in so doing open up debates about the rural-urban, east-west, tangible-intangible and other familiar divides.

Borders tell us much about the complex role heritage plays in societies around the world today. Historically speaking, physical and political borders have led to ideas about enclosed cultures, and a language of cultural property and ownership which marches forward today in tension alongside ideals of universalism and the cosmopolitan. More people are moving across borders than ever before, with vastly different motivations and capacities. What role can heritage studies play in understanding the experiences of migrants or the plight of refugees? And what heritage futures do we need to anticipate as the pressures of international tourism seem to relentlessly grow year by year?

Heritage Across Borders will consider how the values of heritage and approaches to conservation change as objects, experts, and institutions move across frontiers. It will ask how new international cultural policies alter creation, performance, and transmission for artists, craftspersons, musicians, and tradition-bearers.

What are the frontiers of cultural memory in times of rapid transformation? How can museums engage with increasingly diverse audiences by blurring the distinctions between the affective and representational? And do digital reproductions cross important ethical boundaries?

One of the key contributions of critical heritage studies has been to draw attention to the role of heritage in constructing and operationalising boundaries and borders of many kinds-national, social, cultural, ethnic, economic and political.  In what ways do international flows of capital rework indigenous and urban cultures, and reshape nature in ways that redefine existing boundaries?

We especially welcome sessions and papers that challenge disciplinary boundaries and professional divides, and explore cross-border dialogues. What lessons can be learned from Asia where the distinctions between the tangible and intangible are less well marked? And how can researchers bridge cultural and linguistic barriers to better understand these nuances?

For more information regarding sub-themes, regular sessions, panel discussions, schedules, and logistics visit:
http://www.2018achs.com/
http://www.criticalheritagestudies.org/hangzhou-conference/

ASIAN BUILT ENVIRONMENTS

Co-organised by the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, the China Studies Centre and the School of Languages and Culture

3 July 2018 - 5 July 2018

The theme for 2018, Area studies and beyond, builds upon the traditional interdisciplinary fields of research within Asian Studies and seeks to move beyond them, to celebrate the full breadth and depth of interest in Asia across all fields of research.

Modernisation, urbanisation and globalisation have brought about unprecedented changes across Asia. What new architectural forms and urban spaces are created through the entanglements of new modes of production and historical legacies? How have transnational flows, natural catastrophes and geopolitical shifts shaped the development of built environments? How are notions of class, ethnicity, race, gender and nation negotiated in these charged contexts? And what sorts of social relations, theories and developmental patterns are at stake as a result? The SAUH-Asia stream at the ASAA conference will explore these questions by bringing together papers ranging from empirical studies of built environments to broad concerns about the theorisation of “Asia” as a geographical, cultural, political and economic entity in a global era. The abstract will be reviewed by two readers.

Tracing emerging trajectories

Organised by the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore
Funded by the National University of Singapore Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Seed Fund
Convenors: Lilian Chee, Simone Chung, Jessica Cook 

More than the terms ‘home’ and the ‘interior’, domesticity implicates gender, sexuality, labour, class, ethnicity and taste. It suggests certain productions – biological, material, psychological, social, and even national. It concerns the performative aspect of bodies in space – occupants, tenants, parents, grandparents, children, maids, architects, designers, builders, state-representatives. It also involves spatial practices which represent, reproduce, construct and govern these bodies. Its scope is wide-ranging, referring amongst others to ‘domestic sustenance’, ‘domestic affiliation’, ‘domestic comfort’ ‘domestic help’, or ‘domestic boundaries’.  This international workshop will bring together academics working to challenge the established notions of ‘domesticity’, ‘home’, ‘architecture’ and ‘space’, and re-interrogate the inherent relationships of these four tenets. Emphasizing aspects of domesticity and domestic spaces/ practices, it reconsiders the implications that recent national and/ or global changes bring to studies of home and rootedness related to a variety of disciplines including architecture, urban space and planning, geography, anthropology, landscape studies and ethnography. The workshop will discuss how these changing relationships affect disciplinary discourses, and their histories and theories. It aims to instigate the theorization of domestic spaces and ‘homes’ across diverse geographical, political and cultural boundaries and regions, suggesting that there are perhaps significant overlaps in our increasingly fragmented world.

We are interested in the politics and poetics of domestic space as these relate to: policies and protectionism, war and territorial conflict, economic liberalization, consumerism and consumption, colonization and decolonization, gender/race/ethnicity, migration, nation building, media culture, and technological developments in building processes and domestic products. How does domesticity allow us to negotiate these complex situations and processes while also thinking materially about the lived spaces that cultivate the seeds of self and society? What are the disciplinary implications of using domesticity as a critical lens  to look at home and identity? Do domestic material expressions contest or cross geopolitical boundaries? Can domestic cultures propose new architectural and spatial outcomes in relation to spatial typologies? Does domesticity provoke new methodologies for representing architectural histories and theories beyond conventional architectural representations of drawings and models as well as architect-driven intentions? How domesticity work as an apparatus of culture, often being made to stand for the very idea of culture, and of cultural difference?

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New Zealand Asian Studies Society Conference 2017

Bringing together scholars working in the broader, open, and contested site of Asian studies

In line with NZASIA's key objectives, our biennial conference is multidisciplinary and aims at bringing together scholars working in the broader, open, and contested site of Asian studies. We particularly seek contributions from emerging scholars and postgraduate students and a number of events are specifically targeted to support the new generation of researchers (See our Pre-conference Postgraduate Workshop , NZASIA Postgraduate Prizes ).

Here you will find all the information you need about the conference: HERE

CCSEAS Conference York University Toronto Canada

The 33rd Biennial CCSEAS conference theme—‘People In and Out of Place’—represents a long standing and yet often forgotten dynamic of a region known as the crossroads of different peoples, histories, cultures and politics. We welcome panels, roundtables and screen works to discuss the meaning of this condition by exploring the conflicting formation and transformation of institutions, knowledges, ideologies, ecologies, identities, places and practices in the rural, urban and peri-urban spaces of the region, and in diasporic Southeast Asian communities.

Vist the CCSEAS 2017 web site at http://ccseas.ca or email ccseas@yorku.ca.