Dear fellow scholars and researchers,
We are two Ph.D. students from Cornell University and the University of Toronto respectively. We are seeking to co-organize a panel on "Imagining Urban Futures in Asia: Temporality, Materiality, and Solidarities" that explores the production and circulation of urban imaginaries across Asia and its diasporas, with particular attention to their temporal, material, and geopolitical dimensions. Below is our working panel description, which may be refined slightly depending on the final lineup of participants.
From port cities and ethnic enclaves to special economic zones and camptowns, urban formations across Asia and its diasporas have been made and remade through racialized, gendered, and classed relations. These socio-spatial processes are deeply intertwined with temporal imaginaries that position Asia and Asianness as signs of either urban decline or progress. As recent discourses of the "Asian Century" recast Asia as the epicenter of global capitalist futurity, geographer Ananya Roy poses the question "When is Asia?" to interrogate "how futurity itself becomes a mode of governing."
This panel explores the moments when visions of Asia's urban futurity are articulated, circulated, and contested. We examine the worldliness and inter-referentiality of urban imaginations as shaped not only by dominant actors such as states, planners, and multinational corporations, but also by activists, NGOs, and subaltern actors envisioning decolonial and reparative futures. How do colonialism and militarism, development and globalization, produce uneven promises of urban futurity along fault lines of difference and sameness? How do transnational solidarities, political struggles, and liberatory knowledge projects open new sites for future-building? And how do urban imaginaries and material flows-of investment, aid, population, and data-mutually constitute one another?
We are seeking one additional participant who could consider joining us as co-presenter. If interested, please kindly contact us at sabrina.chung@mail.utoronto.ca before July 20, with a brief description of the paper you wish to present and how it fits into our panel description. We will aim at responding to all inquiries by July 22.
Thank you in advance for your consideration and we look forward to hearing from those who are interested!
Sincerely,
Sabrina Teng-io Chung
Ph.D. candidate
Department of East Asian Studies
University of Toronto
Tsuguta Yamashita
Ph.D. candidate
Department of Asian Studies
Cornell University
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Teng-io Chung
University of Toronto
sabrina.chung@mail.utoronto.ca
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