The SSRC’s InterAsia Program, launched in 2008, challenges the implications and limitations of the Asia construct by promoting frameworks and concepts for a new generation of scholarship that reconceptualizes Asia as a dynamic and interconnected formation spanning Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East (including Turkey), and Russia. Through collaborative research, scholarly networking, and public policy connections, we move beyond the territorial fixities of area-studies research without discounting the importance of contextually grounded, place-based knowledge.
A grants program for junior scholars carries this new paradigm forward. Thematic emphases, while evolving, have included religious networks, old histories / new geographies, migration and circulation, security and insecurity, and transformations in a rapidly globalizing world.
In 2009, the Council began working with multiple national and institutional partners, the InterAsia Partnership, to actively reshape research on InterAsia. Core activities of the InterAsia Partnership include the InterAsian Connections Conference Series, a Transregional Virtual Research Institute, and various nodal activities that build on the institutional strengths of each partner.
Programs & Projects
Since 2009, the Council has worked in collaboration with multiple core institutional partners to construct InterAsia as a new research site. The InterAsia Partnership has built international and interdisciplinary scholars’ networks, transformed scholarly approaches and research agendas, and promoted the development of innovative comparisons on a number of cross-regional and transregional themes.
Overview The international InterAsian Connections Conference Series is the cornerstone of the InterAsia Partnership and of the overall InterAsia Program. The Council launched the series with an inaugural conference in …
The InterAsia Academy—aimed at advanced graduate students and early-career researchers—will build upon this work through an explicit focus on pedagogy, specifically examining the broad theme of "Integration and Disintegration in InterAsian Perspective."
In 2012, in close collaboration with colleagues at Göttingen University, the Council launched the Transregional Virtual Research Institute (TVRI), a collaborative enterprise that brings together faculty from different disciplines, different international campuses, and at different stages in their careers to further research and training on particular themes.
News & Events
Reproduction Mobility in Asia
Regional Knowledge Hubs in Asia: the Social Sciences and Humanities in Science and Technology Human Capital (STHC)
Old Histories, New Geographies: Contrapuntal Mobilities of Trade and State across Asia
Inter-Asian temple and trust networks within and out of Southeast Asia
How Asia Became Territorial
Sustainability and Citizenship in Asian Cities