Area Studies at the Crossroads

In this pioneering volume, leading scholars from a diversity of backgrounds in the humanities, social sciences, and different area studies argue for a more differentiated and self-reflected role of area-based science in global knowledge production. Considering that the mobility of people, goods, and ideas make the world more complex and geographically fixed categories increasingly obsolete, the authors call for a reflection of this new dynamism in research, teaching, and theorizing. The book thus moves beyond the constructed divide between area studies and systematic disciplines and instead proposes methodological and conceptual ways for encouraging the integration of marginalized and often overseen epistemologies. Essays on the ontological, theoretical, and pedagogical dimension of area studies highlight how people's everyday practices of mobility challenge scholars, students, and practitioners of inter- and transdisciplinary area studies to transcend the cognitive boundaries that scholarly minds currently operate in.

I Area Studies at the Crossroads. - 1. Introduction: Knowledge Production, Area Studies and the Mobility Turn. - 2. The Neoliberal University and Global Immobilities of Theory. - II To Be or Not to Be Is Not the Question. Rethinging Area Studies in Its Own Right. - 3. Doing Area Studies in the Americas and Beyond. Towards Reciprocal Methodologies and the Decolonization of Knowledge. - 4. Area Studies @ Southeast Asia: Alternative Areas vs Alternatives to Areas. - 5. Between Ignoring and Romanticizing: The Position of Area Studies in Policy Advice. - III Knowledge Production after the Mobility Turn. - 6. Positionality and the Relational Production of Place in the Context of Student Migration to Gilgit, Pakistan. - 7. Red Lines for Uncivilized Trade? : Fixity, Mobility and Positionality on Almaty' s Changing Bazaars. - 8. Margins or Centre? Konkani Sufis, India and ' Arabastan' . - IV From Local Realities to Concepts and Theorizing. - 9. The Role of Area Studies in Theory Production. A Differentiation of Mid-Range Concepts and the Example of Social Order. - 10. The Production of Knowledge in the Field of Development and Area Studies: From Systems of Ignorance to Mid-Range Concepts for Global Ethnography. - 11. New Area Studies, Translation and Mid-Range Concepts. - 12. Mid-Range Concepts - The Lego Bricks of Meaning-Making. An Example from Khorezm, Uzbekistan. - V De-Streamlining Academic Society: Pedagogy and Teaching. - 13. The Case for Reconceptualizing Southeast Asian Studies. - 14. This Area is [Not] Under Quarantine: Rethinking Southeast/Asia through Studies of the Cinema. - 15. Teaching to Transgress: Crossroads Perspective and Adventures in (?)-Disciplinarity. - VI Anticipating the Future of Area Studies. - 16. Are Transregional Studies the Future of Area Studies? . - 17. Reflecting the Moving Target of Asia. - 18. The Art of Science Policy for 21st Century Area Studies: Concluding Reflections