Center for Southeast Asian Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison

PUBLIC ASIAN STUDIES Mellon-Borghesi Workshop (2024-2025)

PUBLIC ASIAN STUDIES

Mellon-Borghesi Workshop 

UW-Madison

2024-2025

How can Asian Studies scholarship be responsive to historical and ongoing injustice in Asia, including state violence, land dispossession, and the persecution of gender and sexual minorities? What are the ways in which scholars and universities have contributed to injustice, either through active cooperation with violent states or through their silence about it? How is this complicity related through the inequality present within universities and the broader field of Asian Studies in the United States that has long been structured around colonial and neocolonial projects of knowledge extraction? Cognizant of these intertwined histories, how can scholars and scholarship challenge injustice and contribute to the imagination and the forging of justice both in Asia and the institutions in which knowledge about Asia is created and disseminated? Motivated by these questions, the Public Asian Studies Mellon-Borghesi Workshop assesses the field of Asian Studies, examines ourselves as scholars and practitioners, and forges a plan for transforming the field at UW-Madison and beyond.  

For the Fall 2024 semester, we invite you to join our public reading group. See below for a schedule and a link to the readings. We welcome any UW community member, with the request that you complete the readings before attending. 

Schedule:

  1. WHY | Historiography | Wednesday | 16 October, 10-11,30 am | University Club Building 313
  2. WHO | Publics and the Public | Tuesday | 5 November, 9-10, 30 am | Ingraham 336
  3. WHAT | Space for Asia in Public Humanities| Wednesday | 20 November, 10-11,30 am | University Club Building 313
  4. WHY | Methodologies and Activism |Tuesday | 3 December, 9-10,30 am | Ingraham 336

 

Link to Readings folder: https://bit.ly/4eHENF2 

Questions: jsealab@wisc.edu

This program is a part of the Borghesi-Mellon Interdisciplinary Workshops in the Humanities, sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with support from Nancy and David Borghesi and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.