Asia Re-Connecting? Crisis, Intimacy and Critique
2022 East Asian Anthropological Association (EAAA) Annual Meeting
National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan
October 15-17, 2022
The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the world since its spread in 2020, disconnecting families, societies, economies, as well as anthropologists from their fieldsites. East Asia, where this crisis first emerged, is also the region which has weathered the crisis most successfully, although not without controversy. In 2022, in the context of new border regimes, new forms of (distanced) intimacy, and precarious supply chains, people are finding new ways to (re)-connect with each other. Anthropologists in East Asia and across the world find there is no simple “returning to normal” fieldwork, but search for new ways of making and sustaining connections. This Call for Papers invites anthropologists and related scholars to deliberate on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its ongoing impact and other emerging challenges that are crucial to our concern in East Asia.
How can anthropology illuminate the many ways people are seeking to reconnect and re-establish intimacies with others in a new context? More importantly, how might an “ethnographic sensibility” help us understand the different and sometimes contradictory ways people reconnect their worlds and establish new futures? A lingering and seemingly never-ending crisis not only challenges people’s lives and governance, it also generates a space for reflecting on humanistic concerns, and yearning either for pasts imagined to have been less precarious, or for imagined futures which might be realized. Defining the stakes of the crisis, rebuilding intimacies and making critiques look very differently depending on whether one is a laborer, investor, student, migrant, farmer, health worker, fisherman, activist, ritual specialist, politician, male, female, straight, queer, or transgendered (to only name a few).
We invite submissions from anthropologists from East Asia working in East Asia on a broad range of topics related to crisis, intimacy, and critique in reconnecting Asia. Recommended topics include the following:
1) Anthropocene in East Asia: The biopolitics of epidemics and medicine; climate change; human-animal and human-plant relations; landscapes; environmentalism; debates on sustainable development; the anthropology of food; food sovereignty and activism; the manufacturing of the senses; health and quality of life; alternative forms of life.
2) Social and Political Movements: Propaganda and political discourse; the struggles and strategies of indigenous peoples, recognition, social justice; migrant labor; anti-imperialism; populism; nationalism and patriotism; race and ethnicity; the politics of liberalism and illiberalism.
3) Intimacy, Hope and Anxiety: Affect; the end of intimacy; connectivity; political intimacy; spiritual belonging; religious revivalism; global health and education; community sustainability; psychological well-being; happiness and suffering; care and caring; burn out; communicability, stigma and xenophobia; active ageing; quality of life.
4) Digital Technology and Network Society: Digital ethnography, surveillance capitalism; net armies and “fake news”; technocracy and pandemic control; border and entry control; artificial intelligence; big data and censorship; incarceration; the metaverse and the future of social media; infrastructure; equality and inequality.
5) Global East Asia: Suspended globalization; regrouping; reopening; democracy; vaccine equity and hesitancy; socialism; capitalism; neoliberalism; disrupted supply chains; the inflation crisis; mobility and migration; cultural heritage and cultural revivalism; transnational movements for and against race, gender and LGBTQ+ equality.
Please fill in the online Submission Form (preferred); or download the submission form, fill in it, and send it back to taipeimeeting@gmail.com. The deadline for submission is May 31, 2022.
Individual Papers:
Online submission or download form
Proposed Panel:
Online submission or download form
The registration fee is US$50 (non-student) or US$20 (student), which includes receptions and meals during the conference (October 15-16). Participants need to pay for their own travel and lodging. We are reserving rooms at two guesthouses/hotels and participants can choose the types of room and register with the hotels at their convenience. The availability of reserved rooms will be first come, first served. Participants can also arrange their own lodging. Further information on conference registration, lodging, and the optional post-conference tour will be delivered in two months after the submission deadline.
Due to the lingering uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, we list a 4-step application procedure and dates below for your attention:
Step 1: Submit Individual Paper or Proposed Panel by May 31, 2022.
Step 2: Receive Acceptance Notification and related information by July 31, 2022.
Step 3: Submit Post-conference Tour Form by August 31, 2022.
Step 4: Pay registration fee in order to keep presentation in the conference program by September 15, 2022.
We look forward to your submission for joining the 2022 EAAA in Taipei this October!