Seeking Panelists, Chair, and Discussant for AAS 2027

Mobile Youth and Political Belonging: Religion, Nationalism, and Institutional Encounters across Asia

I am organizing a comparative panel proposal for the 2027 Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, to be held in Boston on March 18–21, 2027.

This panel asks how mobility across universities, migration regimes, diasporic communities, digital networks, and other transnational institutions reshapes political belonging among young people in Asia.

Rather than treating mobile youth merely as students, migrants, or recipients of state policy, the panel approaches them as political subjects who encounter competing narratives of nationhood, religion, citizenship, minority difference, democracy, and moral community. These institutional encounters may reinforce inherited political identities, unsettle majoritarian narratives, generate new attachments, or produce more conditional forms of belonging.

My paper examines international students in Taiwan whose encounters with democratic institutions, religious plurality, and education-migration infrastructures reshape the plausibility of religious-nationalist and populist claims carried from their societies of origin. I develop the concept of migratory legitimation to explain how mobility can strengthen, weaken, or reinterpret political narratives concerning virtuous peoples, religious authenticity, threatened nations, minorities, and allegedly corrupt elites.

I welcome theoretically informed and empirically grounded papers examining East, Southeast, South, Central, or transnational Asia. Particularly relevant topics include:

• international student mobility and political socialization;

• religion, nationalism, and migration;

• diaspora and transnational youth politics;

• minority identity and conditional belonging;

• universities as spaces of democratic, secular, or ideological encounter;

• mobile youth and religious-majoritarian politics;

• nationalism among students, migrants, returnees, or diasporic communities;

• digital mobility, political communication, and transnational publics;

• institutional welcome, exclusion, incorporation, or recognition;

• historical or comparative approaches to youth mobility and political identity.

Every proposed paper should address a shared comparative question:

How does movement across institutional or political borders reshape young people's understanding of who belongs, on what terms, and with what political consequences?

The proposed organized panel will include three or four paper presentations, one chair, and preferably a senior discussant. I seek contributors from different institutions, career stages, disciplines, genders, and Asian regions. Scholars based in Asia, early-career researchers, and researchers working on underrepresented cases are especially encouraged to respond.

Interested scholars should send:

1. a provisional paper title;

2. an abstract of 200–250 words;

3. name, institutional affiliation, country of current professional location, and career stage;

4. a short biographical note of approximately 75 words; and

5. two or three sentences explaining how the paper contributes to the panel's comparative argument.

I am also interested in hearing from scholars willing to serve as panel chair or discussant, particularly those working across religion and politics, migration, youth studies, nationalism, democracy, or comparative Asian Studies.

Please send expressions of interest by July 12, 2026. Selected contributors will be asked to refine their abstracts collaboratively so that the final submission presents a coherent comparative intervention rather than a collection of loosely related papers.

Jayson Troy Ferro Bajar
Senior Doctoral Candidate, Ph.D. Program in Asia-Pacific Regional Studies
College of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan
Email: jaysontroy46@gmail.com

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Jayson Troy Bajar
National Dong Hwa University (NDHU)
jaysontroy46@gmail.com
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