SNUAC Special Lecture

Title: Beyond Boundaries: IIAS’s Current Activities aimed at Framing Asian Studies in the Global Context

Time: Thursday, 10 December 2015, 14:00 – 16: 00 pm

Language: Lecture will be given in English

Venue: Seoul National University Asia Center Rm. #303

Presenter

Bio: Philippe Peycam / Director of the IIAS, Leiden

Philippe Peycam is the director of the International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden, The Netherland. He is a trained historian whose first book on the origins of a Vietnamese public culture of contestation during the colonial occupation, The Birth of Vietnamese Political Journalism: Saigon 1916-30, was published by Columbia University Press (May, 2012). For 10 years, Dr. Peycam worked as founding director of the Center for Khmer Studies, an academic and capacity building institution in Cambodia. He is currently working on an essay which sets out to use this experience at CKS to frame a reproducible policy model aimed at civil society empowerment through cultural and intellectual institutional infrastructures in post-war societies.

Dr. Peycam’s double trajectory, academic and institution building, stems from an early interest in phenomena such as colonialism and modes of resistance to it; the creative role of the city as a privileged environment for new forms of social and cultural interactions, and ultimately, consciousness; the importance of cultural forms and representations, from material and immaterial heritages to institutional knowledge production, and the challenge of building cross-cultural, transnational bridges out of these contexts. He sees these intellectual interests as having implications for concrete development policies in today’s postcolonial societies. From 2010-2011, he was a United States Institute of Peace’s Jenning Randolph Fellow. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.

• Host      SNUAC
• Contact 02-880-2693
• Email    gounkim@snu.ac.kr

Abstract

The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) recently engaged in a long-term program aimed at strengthening and redirecting Asian studies. This initiative draws on IIAS’s adaptable institutional set up and its multi-faceted activities to foster new humanities-focused research and educational opportunities built upon an inclusive interdisciplinary, trans-sectorial, inter-regional network of scholars, artists and creative social leaders and their institutions in Asia, North America, Europe and Africa. The talk will explore some of the new areas of intervention being experimented by IIAS.

IIAS’s long-term objective is to contribute to frame the contours of a global humanistic knowledge about Asia, beyond the traditional area studies, linking emerging fields and scholars through real and virtual spaces of engagement and interaction, enabling them to explore new ways to link disciplines with deep area knowledge and language competences while drawing on technology to create global sites for networking among Asia-focused communities. The breadth of the project should enable its participants to think in terms of decentering – and decentralizing – knowledge about Asia, exploring alternative narratives of Asian agencies beyond normative representations, by for instance reframing conventional spatial configurations of Asia, by linking global and local dimensions through the idea of the City, or by transcending traditional scholarly frames like the nation-state. By facilitating the creation of new communities of intellectual interactions and opening a critical dialogue in search of new intellectual frontiers, the IIAS aims to shape a globally connected network of individuals and institutions working concomitantly on, with and in Asia.