Global Multi-Year Partnerships

Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and National University of Singapore (NUS)

At the IAC Conference in Seoul: Prof. Helen F. Siu (left) listening to Prof. Angela Ki Che Leung at the Directors’ Plenary Session “Mediated Populism Across Asia”

At the IAC Conference in Seoul: Prof. Helen F. Siu (top) listening to Prof. Angela Ki Che Leung at the Directors’ Plenary Session “Mediated Populism Across Asia”

Since 2010, the Institute has worked with the Social Science Research Council and National University of Singapore to organize international conferences under the “Inter-Asian Connections” (IAC) program. The partnership has extended to Yale University and University of Göttingen in the last three years. The extended partnership has organized two IAC conferences (fifth and sixth of the series).

The fifth conference was hosted by the Seoul National University Asia Center (SNUAC) in April 2016. The sixth conference was hosted by the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (VASS) in Hanoi in December 2018. Each conference was composed of open plenary sessions, keynote speeches, and six to eight workshops to showcase cutting-edge research from across the social sciences and related disciplines that underlined the re-definition of Asia as a region by its connectedness and dis-connectedness. Applications to each event were more than 200. Only 101 were accepted in 2016, and 74 in 2018.

At the IAC Conference in Seoul: Prof. Helen F. Siu (left) listening to Prof. Angela Ki Che Leung at the Directors’ Plenary Session “Mediated Populism Across Asia”

At the IAC Conference in Seoul: Prof. Helen F. Siu (top) listening to Prof. Angela Ki Che Leung at the Directors’ Plenary Session “Mediated Populism Across Asia”

At the 2018 conference in Hanoi, Dr. Izumi Nakayama of the Institute co-directed the workshop “States of Fortifications: Connecting Asia through Technologies of Food and Health” with Prof. Melissa L. Caldwell of University of California, Santa Cruz. Ten papers were accepted for this workshop on technological interventions in food and health and how informed projects of modernity, sovereignty, empire building, and subjectivity across Asia, with particular attention to the temporal and geopolitical modalities. The group planned to edit a special journal issue with selected workshop papers.