Dissertation Workshops

From Indopedia

• Dissertation Workshop - Democracy and Identity in Asia

-- The Asian Institute at the University of Toronto invites applications and participants for a dissertation workshop on “Democracy and Identity in Asia” to be held May 13-15, 2010. The workshop will focus on the themes of democracy and identity in any part of Asia. Applicants should be researching some aspect of the politics of identity recognition in Asia in recent decades, and the challenges it has posed to practices and understandings of democracy. Questions to be considered include: How do emerging democracies accommodate group demands? How do historically defined notions of state and nation clash with emerging claims for ethnic, gender, and sexual identity recognition? How is the very meaning of democracy in Asia being reformulated to account for these claims? What kinds of political spaces have allowed the mobilization of identity-based movements to develop in Asia?

-- The workshop will take place over two or three days on the campus of the University of Toronto. It will include a small group of students and a few faculty members representing different disciplines and interdisciplinary fields. The costs of the workshop, meals, and accommodations will be covered by the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto. Travel will be subsidized up to a maximum of CDN$500 per participant. Applicants should seek additional travel grants from their home institutions, and consult with the Asian Institute if travel costs prove problematic.

-- APPLICATION DEADLINE is JANUARY 15, 2010:

Applications consist of two items:

1) A current curriculum vitae.

2) An 8 to 10 page double spaced dissertation proposal. Alternatively, if the work is well underway, an 8 to 10 page double spaced description of the specific issues being addressed, the intellectual approach, and the materials being studied. Workshop participants will be selected on the content of the submitted projects, the potential for useful exchanges among them, and the benefits of including a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches and intellectual traditions. Applications should be sent by email attachment to asian.institute@utoronto.ca.. Applicants will be informed whether or not they have been selected for the workshop by January 31st. For further information about the workshop or eligibility, please contact asian.institute@utoronto.ca.

• Association for Asian Studies Dissertation Workshop

-- Ninth consecutive AAS Dissertation Workshop “Popular Culture and Social Change” will be held in conjunction with the annual meeting in Philadelphia next spring, March 28-31, 2010. The workshop will again be organized and led by David Szanton, and follow the model used in previous workshops.

-- No longer are Asian Studies largely focused on courts and peasants, ancient cultures, classical texts, and traditional forms. Today all across the humanities and social sciences scholars are approaching and re-interpreting a rapidly changing Asia through various forms of popular culture (film, sports, TV, music, dance, radio, online networks, fiction, fashion, cuisine, fan clubs, martial arts, bars, drugs. etc.), concerned with how it is both producing and marking social, and cultural change all across the region. Intergenerational differences and tensions are growing all across the region, often with serious political consequences. Popular culture, as an alternative “unofficial view of the world,” as a form of subtle or overt resistance to the hegemonic, has become an important lens for approaching and analyzing Asia's rapidly expanding middle classes, urbanization, consumerism, differentiation and stratification, political mobilization, geographical mobility, diasporic influences, and both transnational and globalizing sensibilities.

-- This workshop is intended to bring together doctoral students in the humanities and social sciences who are (1) developing dissertation proposals or are in early phases of research or dissertation writing; and who are (2) also dealing with the kinds of issues mentioned above in the context of contemporary or historic Asian states and societies. Participants will be provided meals and hotel accommodations, as well as limited travel subsidies. The application deadline is December 11, 2009. For full details regarding eligibility, application procedures, etc., please refer to the announcement on the AAS website (http://www.asian-studies.org/News/dissertation-workshop.htm).