Area Studies at the Crossroads: Knowledge Production after the Mobility Turn

by Katja Mielke (Editor), Anna-Katharina Hornidge (Editor)

Overview

In this pioneering volume, leading scholars from a diversity of backgrounds in the humanities, social sciences, and different area studies argue for a more differentiated and self-reflected role of area-based science in global knowledge production. Considering that the mobility of people, goods, and ideas make the world more complex and geographically fixed categories increasingly obsolete, the authors call for a reflection of this new dynamism in research, teaching, and theorizing. The book thus moves beyond the constructed divide between area studies and systematic disciplines and instead proposes methodological and conceptual ways for encouraging the integration of marginalized and often overseen epistemologies. Essays on the ontological, theoretical, and pedagogical dimension of area studies highlight how people’s everyday practices of mobility challenge scholars, students, and practitioners of inter- and transdisciplinary area studies to transcend the cognitive boundaries that scholarly minds currently operate in.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137598349
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	02/28/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	363
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Katja Mielke (Dr. phil.) is Senior Researcher at the Germany-based think tank BICC, a peace and conflict research institute in Bonn. Trained in Social Sciences, East European, and Central Asian Studies, she was one of the initiators of the Germany-wide research network ‘Crossroads Asia’ for rethinking area studies. 

Anna-Katharina Hornidge (Dr. phil.) is Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Bremen, Germany, as well as Head of Department of Social Sciences and of the Working Group ‘Development and Knowledge Sociology’ at the Leibniz-Center for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), Germany. Trained in Sociology and Southeast Asian Studies, she scientifically coordinated ‘Crossroads Asia’ from 2012 to 2014 and was responsible for designing the networks strategy for synthesizing the conducted research. Today, she remains part of the Executive Board of the network.

Table of Contents

I   Introduction: Area studies at the Crossroads      

 

1. From Spatial Containers to Studying the Mobile  

Anna-Katharina Hornidge &Katja Mielke    

 

2. Challenging spatialities of knowledge under globalisation: Strategic responses to the neoliberal university and its role in entrenching the global immobility of theory production    

Peter A. Jackson   

 

II   To be or not to be is not the question. Rethinking Area Studies in its own right 

 

3. Area studies @ Southeast Asia: Concepts and directions for an emerging field of regional science

Christoph Antweiler

 

4. Rethinking “Middle Eastern” Studies post-Arab revolts: Analytical and conceptual queries and propositions

Ali Fathollah-Nejad

 

5. Rethinking the Americas: Entanglement and (De-)Colonization of Space and Knowledge

Olaf Kaltmeier

 

6. Are transregional studies the future of Area Studies?

Matthias Middell

 

III   Mobility, immobility, and positionality in rethinking Area Studies

 

7. The society of betweenness: Migration and identities of migrants as identities in motion

Bianca Boteva-Richter

 

8. Positionality at the crossroads: Gendered lifeworlds, social situatedness and the relational production of place in the context of student migration to Gilgit, Pakistan

Andreas Benz

 

9. Red lines for uncivilised trade?: Fixity, mobility and position on Almaty’s changing bazaars

Henryk Alff

 

10. There and Back Again. Late German Repatriates at Eurasia’s Crossroads

Markus Kaiser& Michael Schoenhuth

 

11. Social (im-)mobility at the margins of rural society in Punjab: Vartan bhanji-exchange practices and coping strategies

Aftab Nasir

12. Margins or Center? Kokani Sufi Muslims between India and Arabastan

Deepra Dandekar

 

IV   Theory-building from local empirical realities

 

13. Developing mid-range concepts in “global ethnography”: from researching development knowledge systems and systems of ignorance to translocal structuration of (gendered) fields and spaces

Gudrun Lachenmann

 

14. The social order concept: An invitation to non-normative ordering in research approaches to past and contemporary local politics

Andreas Wilde& Katja Mielke

 

15. Variants of differentiation in resources governance Khorezm, Uzbekistan: Is this a ‘mid-range concept’?

Anna-Katharina Hornidge

 

V   Deschooling academic society: Pedagogy, practice and policy

 

16. The case for reconceptualising Southeast Asian Studies

Cynthia Chou

 

17. Positioning “Civilization blocs” within the Asia-Pacific region: Implications to the teaching of area studies in tertiary education in the Philippines

Elizabeth T. Urgel& Philip Michael I. Paje

 

18. “This area is [not] under quarantine”: Rethinking Southeast Asian Studies with (new) media

Arnika Fuhrmann

 

19. Teaching to transgress: Crossroads Studies and adventures in (?)-disciplinarity

Epifania Amoo-Adare

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This wide-ranging and pathbreaking collection of essays offers a vision of area studies for our era of mobility, connectivity and fluidity in geographies and in identities. Its insights show how area studies remains a vital resource for studies of science, development, migration and more. The authors place area studies in a series of valuable ethnographic contexts, thus making this volume a timely resource for all scholars concerned with place, theory and comparison.” (Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication, New York University, US)

“Social sciences as a product of the cold war academia have been actively questioned and criticized in the last twenty five years everywhere, including in the West itself. Area Studies at the Crossroads is a product of recent radical rethinking efforts of the previous colonizing approaches to the study of the other. It contributes to outlining a new ethical-political dimension for area studies' future.” (Madina Tlostanova, Professor of Postcolonial Feminisms, Linköping University, Sweden)

“De-centered Area Studies are the way forward in knowledge production at the intersection of new humanities, social sciences and regional studies. They no longer focus on mere ontological innovations or territorially defined regions. The essays in this volume should be read by Areanists and Disciplinarians alike.” (Claudia Derichs, Professor and Chair for Comparative Politics and International Development Studies, Philipps University of Marburg, Germany)

Editorial Reviews

Area Studies at the Crossroads can be recommended for any scholars (and institutional libraries) working not only in Asian/ Southeast Studies but also area studies generally.” (Paul Vickers, Connections, May 16, 2020)

From the Publisher