The Global Asias Initiative is seeking papers for sponsored panels that will be submitted for the in-person Association of Asian Studies conference running March 18-21, 2027, in Boston, MA. 250 word abstracts and 2-page CVs should be submitted to organizers by July 31st, 2026. Please find the individual panel statements and the organizers' contact information below.
Preeti Singh (preeti.singh@duke.edu)
- Queer Utopias and Infrastructures of Refuge in Global Asias
Zhangzhu Wan (zhangzhu.wan@mail.utoronto.ca)
- Translocal Ecologies: Asian Diasporas, Climate Disruption, and Entangled Futures
Saira Iqbal (saira.iqbal@aiou.edu.pk)
Eva Gerharz
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Asian Emergencies (Preeti Singh preeti.singh@duke.edu)
The use of emergency and martial laws in postcolonial Asia has a long history. The Indian National emergency declared by Indira Gandhi (1975-1977), Ferdinand Marcos' "constitutional dictatorship" in the Philippines (1965-1986), South Korean president Park Chung-Hee's Yushin Constitution (1972-1979) followed by Chun Doo-Hwan's declaration of martial law (1980-1989), Pakistan's Muhammad Zia Ul Haq's decade long dictatorship (1977-1988), and the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) have all been documented, reimagined and memorialized across a range of cultural forms such as novels, poetry, cinema, and comics.
While often rendered in provincial terms, Asian Emergencies reflected colonial legacies and were caught up in the transnational circuits of Cold War decolonization. Their reverberations were felt in Asian America and across the Asian diaspora, which played a complex role in consolidating the political memory of authoritarian rule in Asia. In the past few years, multiple studies of authoritarianism in Asia have examined the Emergency's aesthetic and political dimensions (Watson 2021, Ben-Yishai 2023, Diaz 2022) while situating them within broader histories of decolonization.
This panel invites papers that engage Asian Emergencies and their representations across literature, cinema, and other cultural forms. What forms of aesthetic address and political memory are constructed around the Emergency? What continuities and divergences emerge when we read the Emergency, comparatively, across Global Asias? How does the "Emergency", as a politico-legal concept and historical event, enable the unsettling of the disciplinary formations of Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, and Asian Diaspora Studies?
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Queer Utopias and Infrastructures of Refuge in Global Asias (Zhangzhu Wan zhangzhu.wan@mail.utoronto.ca)
This panel examines how queer and feminist utopias are imagined, inhabited, and destabilized across Global Asias. Rather than treating refuge as a stable sanctuary or utopia as a distant future, the panel asks how alternative worlds emerge through fragile arrangements of intimacy, media, ecology, technology, history, and storytelling. It foregrounds spaces where queer and feminist life becomes temporarily perceptible: domestic arrangements, speculative worlds, suppressed histories, digital platforms, pop media, ecological retreats, and embodied practices of gathering.
Situated at the intersections of Global Asias, gender, and sexualities, the panel asks: What makes queer or feminist refuge possible amid social, political, economic, and ecological precarity? How do intimate spaces and mediated forms produce alternative kinship, temporality, and world-making? How might Global Asias theorize futurity not as guaranteed progress, but as something sensed, rehearsed, hallucinated, and briefly inhabited?
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Translocal Ecologies: Asian Diasporas, Climate Disruption, and Entangled Futures (Saira Iqbal saira.iqbal@aiou.edu.pk)
Asian diasporas are active participants in the social, cultural and environmental consequences of climate disruption because they remain entangled to their places of origin through family, rituals, digital communication, and material support. These enduring relations means that climate disruption is not confined to homeland; it reverberates across borders, shaping the cultural lives, emotional attachments, and everyday practices of diasporic communities. This panel treats homeland and diaspora not as separate analytical sites but as a shared translocal field. Here, translocality foregrounds the continuing circulation of people, seasonal knowledge, cultural practices, and ecological memory between specific localities and diaspora settlements ; producing shared, yet unevenly distributed, experiences of environmental change. Whether a flooded delta in Bengal, a drought-stricken village in Rajhastan, a sinking coastal town in Jakarta, a glacier fed valley in Baltistan or Nagaland, a forest or a sacred groove disappearing in western Ghats, a salinized rice padding in Mekong delta, a river losing its seasonal flood pulse in the Indus basin or a harvest festival in Punjab, no longer aligned with its agricultural calendar – remain attached to diaspora communities abroad via remittances, return visits, digital communication, ritual practices and heritage initiatives that sustain cultural continuity in their places of origin.
Bringing together Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, and Asian Diaspora Studies, this panel invites contributions that examine how climate disruption reshapes the relationships linking homeland and diaspora rather than treating environmental change as geographically bounded. We particularly welcome contributions that examine:
- The layered precarity triggered when climate displacement adds new layers to already existing migration patterns.
- The translocal networks through which knowledge keeps moving between homeland and diaspora.
- The transformation of rituals and heritage practices including seasonal festivals, agricultural knowledge and devotional traditions- as their original ecological anchors destabilize.
- How diasporic communities carry, adapt or re-invent place-based cultural memory when the landscapes that shaped it are themselves in flux.
- Comparative and interdisciplinary approaches that advance new understandings of climate, mobility, and translocal belonging across Asia.
By framing Asian diasporas as active participants rather than passive witnesses or merely inheritors of living heritage, this panel positions diaspora as central to understanding the human and cultural stakes of climate disruption. It argues that environmental change transforms the translocal relationships connecting people, places, memories, and cultural practices. It invites new ways of imagining entangled futures in which homeland and diaspora, ecology and memory, adaptation and loss are continually renegotiated rather than understood as separate domains.
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Project Manager Global Asias Initiative
The Pennsylvania State University
gai@psu.edu------------------------------