Congratulations to Prof Grewal on receiving funding from the Jackman Humanities Institute for a new Emerging Interventions in Contemporary China Studies working group!
This working group is a forum for those engaged in China studies, from a variety of disciplines, at both the tri-campus University of Toronto and other local universities, to come together as a community of scholars after years of relative isolation, and at a time of political and academic urgency affecting the field. On the one hand, this urgency arises out of a shift in global public discourses and imaginaries about “China,” be it as surveillance state and aspiring hegemon, as a space embodying and provoking health and climate crises, or as a site for new forms of cultural, political and social movements. On the other hand, China studies scholars are facing new urgent questions of how to study China as a subject – historically and in the contemporary moment. In no small part, the question of what, where, and how to locate studies of China has been compelled by new restrictions on accessing national and local archives in China. At the same time, scholars are engaged in re-assessing the dominant narratives, sites and meanings of China’s revolutionary century, while state violence and rising voices from the peripheries of the political community (for e.g. Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, new feminist and LGBTQ+ voices), or an emerging environmental consciousness have further opened up definitions of who and what we study as scholars of China. We are thus in the midst of a range of conflicting processes of centring and decentering China, as both an object and site of research.
Under these conditions of urgency, this working group is a forum for participants to share their current projects and enter into discussions over methodology, sources, themes and research questions. Through our gatherings, we can create a space, however tentative, from which to ask how as scholars we shape, question and engage larger, conflicting realms of public discourse and action defining China.