Progressive Geographies

Call for Papers: Inaugural Association of Asian Studies-in-ASIA Conference. July 17-19 2014. Singapore

Session Title Asia on the move: unpacking cross-border mobilities

Cross-border mobilities are proliferating in Asia. From Hong Kong to Shenzhen, from Beijing to Tokyo, the region now includes many of the world’s busiest air routes, and land and sea border crossings. Yet, at the same time, multiple borders and territories remain unsettled. Even inscription devices that facilitate and regulate transnational mobility have themselves become weapons in what TIME Asia magazine has termed a “Passport War”, in which rival states use passports and visas to performatively claim national territory, as in the case of China and India’s contest in the Himalayas. Such a phenomenon signals a threat to the region’s semblance of fluidity and unfettered movement.

This session seeks both theoretical and empirical accounts of a wide variety of cross-border mobilities, for tourism, for migration, or for other ends. These accounts may focus on the embodied, corporeal aspects of border crossing, at airports or land or sea transit points. They may also focus on the role of border performativity in the construction of the nation-state. We are particularly interested in the role of devices such as passports and visas, and persons such as travelers and border guards in the production of the border. Likewise, following Anssi Paasi and Étienne Balibar, we are open to the argument that “borders are everywhere”—that they are processes rather than places—and welcome papers that evaluate borders as themselves unfixed and mobile.

Participants who are interested to present a paper in this session are invited to submit the following (as required by the AAS) to Ian Rowen (ian.rowen@colorado.edu) and J.J. Zhang (j.j.zhang@nus.edu.sg) before 21 October 2013:

250 word abstract
Full name
Complete mailing address
Affiliation
Rank
Email address