We are happy to announce that the 3rd PBIC Thai Studies conference shall be on “Ghosts”. The conference shall take place on June 15th 2025 at PBIC Thammasat, Tha Prachan campus. We accept abstracts until May 1st 2025 sent to thstudies@pbic.tu.ac.th. Please see the poster for more information.
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Conference 2025Geo-Social Connection: The Continuing Journey of Critical Inquiry
Walailak University,
Nakhon Si Thammarat, Thailand
23–25 July 2025
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies’s vocation to reconnect political and cultural societies in Asia must be understood as an active resistance to the powers that sever the ties between them. Such powers may take forms of colonial expropriation, capitalist dispossession, or Cold War partitioning. This year’s IACS Conference theme, \”Geo-Social Connection: The Continuing Journey of Critical Inquiry,\” reiterates interconnectedness as an Inter-Asian key concept while highlighting the importance of geography and society as material sites of knowledge production at a continental level. We intentionally experiment with a neologism “geo-social” in this CfP as a conceptual heuristic that may encapsulate Inter-Asian connections defined by, yet being forged beyond, the “geopolitical.” Since 2025 marks two anniversaries meaningful to the IACS: the 15th Anniversary of Chen Kuan-Hsing’s Asia as Method and the 70th Anniversary of the Afro-Asian Bandung Conference, we propose to take these occasions to reflect on Inter-Asia’s past accomplishments, present challenges, and future aspirations. One tactical way to foster existing and emerging geo-social connections is through “inter-referencing,” which assists in illuminating shared problematics, political processes, and societal dynamics that have otherwise been concealed. Our theme reinforces the idea of Inter-Asia as an intellectual movement that continues to ask and grapple with critical questions relevant to Asian publics. We conceive of the IACS Conference 2025 as a space where scholars, cultural workers, and activists come together to collaborate on the following spotlight subthemes:
World/Global South
Challenges
Production
Transformation
Extractivism in Inter-Asian Contexts
We promote these subthemes because they reflect the interests of the organizers and IACS Society members. The Program Committee indeed welcomes every critical inquiry related to Asia from all (inter)disciplines, especially sessions that creatively and innovatively advance knowledge production from/about Asia. We particularly encourage proposals that engage with Inter-Asian and cultural studies frameworks.
We are pleased to invite colleagues to submit proposals for Organized Clusters (3-hour workshop session of 6-10 participants), Organized Panels (90-minute session of 3-4 panelists), Roundtables (90-minute session of 3-6 contributors), and Individual Papers. We strongly encourage organized sessions rather than individual submissions.
Proposals for the first three formats must designate the roles of Organizer (can be the same person as Chair or Presenter), Chair (can be the same person as Organizer or Presenter), and Presenter. Including a Discussant is optional. For Organized Clusters, we do not yet require a complete list of presenters. Once your Cluster is accepted, we will have another 1.5-month window for you to organize your own Call for Panelists. Double sessions can be requested for Clusters (6-hour session of more than 8 participants) and Panels (3-hour session of more than 6 participants). Please briefly explain in the description how you will utilize the double sessions. We will approve the request on a case-by-case basis.
An individual may not present more than one paper (special sessions such as Plenary or Keynote do not count as a paper) but may serve more than one role in the Conference. The Conference is in-person only as we do not have the capacity to afford online participation.
We support innovative proposals that will stimulate lively discussions beyond conventional paper presentations. Here are some examples: a focus on a single major paper, film, or book as the subject of attention, a performance or reading of a creative work followed by a discussion, a workshop of works-in-progress with commentators, a debate on interpretations or methodologies, an exploration of Inter-Asian teaching materials, or a discussion with activists, curators, exhibitors, or filmmakers.
We are committed to diversity and equity. We expect our panel submissions to demonstrate diversity in gender, institution, nationality, and professional role (i.e., graduate students, junior and senior scholars, and other professionals). We strongly urge Asia-based young scholars from diverse backgrounds to reach out, get organized, and apply.
While we ask the proposal to be submitted in English, our language of operation, we accommodate a presentation in an Asian language with the following conditions: 1) the scholar has difficulty presenting in English, 2) the scholar’s research significantly enriches the conversation, 3) a summary of the presentation will be made available in English, and 4) the Organizer or Chair is prepared to facilitate the exchange of ideas through translation and interpretation. This option is *not applicable to Individual Papers.
The deadline for application is November 1, 2024. Please submit the following through this portal, and expect to spare 10-15 minutes to complete the form.
1) proposal title
2) preferred format (i.e. Organized Cluster/Panel/Roundtable or Individual Paper)
3) session abstract/description (250 words maximum)
4) paper title & abstract (200 words maximum) *Not required for Roundtables and Innovative Panels without paper presentations
5) personal information (first and last name, email address, affiliation, position, gender, nationality, and current location *Not full address).
Please direct any questions to the IACS Secretariat at iacs2025wu@gmail.com.
We will notify the Organizer of the results by February 15, 2025. Cluster Organizers will receive an additional set of instructions about the confirmation of participants required by April 30, 2025.
12th Biennial Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference The 12th Biennial Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference will take place at Chiang Mai University, on 14 – 16 August 2025. The focus of the conference is Sustainable Futures: ecologies, kinships and communities in Southeast Asian Cinemas. This theme will be addressed from a broad range of perspectives in order to encourage critical engagement with current debates in film theory and the environmental humanities, inviting papers that theorize the diverse film and media practices across Southeast Asia including new developments in artists’ moving image, video art, VR, and activist media.
Recent years have seen a surge of interest in ecological approaches to film and media studies including publications devoted to Southeast Asia (e.g. Chua, Davis and Taylor, 2021; Chulphongsathorn and Lovatt, 2022; Ryan and Telles, 2022). Seeking to build on this work, the conference invites papers that develop new approaches to questions of ecology and sustainability from a variety of perspectives including film production, exhibition, discussion and circulation. We are interested in papers that respond to questions such as: What can a specific focus on Southeast Asian film bring to existing debates within the fields of energy ethics, the blue humanities, posthumanism and human-nonhuman relations (including human-spirit) and/or animal studies? And what kinds of practices build and sustain communities, kinships and solidarities in the face of ongoing ecological and humanitarian crises brought about by extractivist capitalism, war and authoritarianism?
We welcome a range of methodological and theoretical approaches. Topics could include (but are not limited to):
14th Asian Cinema Studies Society Conference 2025 (May 22-24, 2025)We invite paper and panel proposals to present at the 14th Asian Cinema Studies Society conference to be held at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) during May 22-24, 2025. As a non-profit scholarly organization, the Asian Cinema Studies Society (ACSS) actively fosters international research in Asian film and media and publishes the flagship peer-reviewed journal Asian Cinema (Intellect). With the support of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), the Master of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies Programme (MALCS), and the Department of Comparative Literature of HKU, ACSS brings its first face-to-face meeting since the global pandemic back to Hong Kong, a major Asian metropolis, transport hub, filmmaking capital, and connective node of regional, inter-Asian, and transpacific cultural globalization.
ACSS 2025 invites participants to present papers on any aspect of Asian film and media, though we encourage proposals that address the question: “What is Asian cinema?” Although often understood as cinematic practices, institutions, cultural formations, and critical discourses in or from Asia, the term “Asian cinema” belies its contradictions and complexities as an idea. Historically, scholars challenged such simplistic and binaristic understandings by investigating: how “Asia,” “Asian,” and “cinema” were defined under colonialism and postcolonialism; the way transnational productions trespass national and regional boundaries; the complex relations between home/ancestry/ethnicity/linguistic sharedness and diaspora; as well as how cinema itself often redefines and rewrites the meanings of “Asia” and “Asian.” Recently, theorists posit that the term “Asian cinema” implicitly constructs “cinema” and “media” as universal concepts modified by a particular concept: “Asian,” a construction that perpetuates the orientalist knowledge formation of Asia as an exception to the norm.
In light of these provocations, we ask: Does studying cinema in, from, about, or by Asia/Asians always suggest a power relation between an observer and an observed or an irreconcilable difference between Asia and somewhere else? Do strategically essential concerns justify the particularity of Asian film and media studies? How do evolving meanings and technologies of “cinema,” “film,” and “media” in our era of digital globalization reshape ideas of “Asia” or “Asian?” And, what was Asian cinema?
We welcome discussions and interventions addressing these questions both directly and indirectly, and from different disciplinary perspectives, methods, and approaches. Possible topics in relation to Asian film and media may include, but are not limited to:
Please send proposals or enquiries to acssconference2025@gmail.com. For individual paper proposals, send a 200-300 word abstract and include the title, author name(s), institutional affiliation, mailing address, and email contacts, as well as a brief (50-100 word) biography of the contributor. For pre-constituted panel proposals (of 3-4 papers), provide a brief description (100 words) of the overall panel along with the individual abstracts and contributor information. Sessions will be 90 minutes in duration, and time limits will be strictly enforced. The deadline for submission of proposals is 10 November 2024. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by the end of January 2025.
There will be no conference registration fee per se, but all presenters must be members of the Asian Cinema Studies Society, which requires an annual fee of $550 HKD / $70 USD. Full-time students (with ID) and underemployed scholars may pay a discounted fee of $450 HKD / $57 USD. The fee covers one year membership, one volume (two issues) of Asian Cinema, and gives access to the society’s executive meeting at the conference.