Photo by Paolo Sandicho
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Kristine Reynaldo
2024 IACS Summer School Coordinator and Program Curator
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In his opening lecture for the 2024 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School, Chih-ming Wang characterized the summer school as a “subject-making laboratory” through which “the inter-Asia project is operated and advanced.” The gist of this project, as Chua Beng Huat reiterated in his remarks to the summer school participants, was “to bring Asian scholars, Asian writings in Asia to the global audience and into the global archive. The idea, as Chen Kuan-Hsing has said in Asia as Method, is to multiply locations and frames of references within Asia itself, rather than singular reference of Western material.” Such a tide-turning endeavor requires concerted efforts by generations of scholars in building resources and spaces of encounter, connection, and conversation among intellectuals in Asia. In this regard, Wang in his lecture quotes Muto Ichiyo (2010) in describing the work of the IACS Society as playing “performative roles for the birth of inter-Asian people,” and identifies the biennial summer school as one of the three pillars, along with “movement” and “translation,” of the IACS project.
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The IACS Summer School, organized by the IACS Society with local institutional partners every two years since 2010, has often been described by its participants across various cohorts as “life-changing.” As one student of the 2024 IACS Summer School, Nurul Muthmainnah wrote, it was “a defining experience that … reshaped my understanding of how interconnected we are… . Engaging with participants from various neighboring countries … allowed me to see the nuances and commonalities that bind us beyond borders. The opportunity to learn from each other, exchange ideas, and build meaningful relationships was not just educational but also deeply personal, highlighting the power of solidarity in a shared Asian context.” Another student, Hong Zou, remarked that being part of the summer school “not only provided me with new perspectives about understanding culture, social justice, and development within Asia, but friendships and connections that I would value for the rest of my life.”
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This relational dimension of the summer school was one of our primary concerns in developing the program. Indeed, the situated and durational aspects of IACS summer schools, which typically run for two weeks in a different Asian city for each edition, are key for participants to develop, as Wang observes, “a caring relationship with one another and the location.” This recognition suggests that the IACS intellectual project of “multiplying the objects of identification and constructing alternative frames of reference” (Chen 2010, 2), “mutual referencing to deepen the analysis of the local,” and cultivating a “cohesive transnational intellectual community that is able to accumulate solid knowledge about societies across the region and develop an analytical framework that … facilitate[s] comparative analysis … from the angle of the continent as a whole” (Chen 2016, 113) is also affective. That is to say that to an extent, the IACS project rests on scholars’ desire and capacity to reach beyond the frames of their own linguistic, national, institutional, or disciplinary backgrounds and seek to understand other peoples and problem-spaces in the region and recognize shared concerns, struggles, and aspirations even in the face of divergent national, political, or academic interests.
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This process of building an intellectual community, fraught as it is, “has to begin with a mutual effort to understand each other’s emotional and psychic terrain” (Chen 2010, 157). Thus, the organizers were guided by the awareness that aside from expanding and deepening the IACS knowledge network and promoting Inter-Asian cultural studies scholarship, the summer school is also meant to introduce participants to the local contexts and concerns that inform knowledge production in specific sites in the region, connect scholarship with activism, and build discursive infrastructures for conversations and collaborations among participants who are concerned with the ethical role of cultural studies in imagining and realizing desired collective futures that transcend the interests of nation-states or academic careers. The need to not only “diversify our sense of the resources of knowledge production” but also to “reconnect critical knowledge production to transformatory politics,” as Tejaswini Niranjana writes in her introduction to Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (2015), becomes imperative in the context of “the globalization of higher education” and “professionalization of academia in Asia” (2). As Niranjana observes, “Managerial systems that are now rife in the university compel young academics to direct their energies in ‘approved’ directions, and … consistently deal with a ‘workload’ that never finds completion,” leading to “multiple forms of alienation from knowledge production” (Niranjana 2015, 3). In this light, the role of the IACS Summer Schools in incubating inter-Asian subjectivities and relationships may also be seen as a way of revitalizing young academics’ sense of the significance of their intellectual work and networks beyond the value markers/metrics of university rankings, publication impact indexes, tenure portfolios and associated point systems, and the like.
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The 2024 IACS Summer School, organized by the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman, brought together 30 local and international scholars and cultural workers and activists to serve as summer school faculty, workshop facilitators, and film screening talkback speakers, and 45 graduate students, early-career researchers, and artists from all around the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. Assembled around the theme “Tense and Tender Tropics: Ecologies of Vulnerability and Care,” the summer school program consisted of lectures, panel discussions, film screenings, creative workshops, field visits, and small-group discussions that sought to address four interrelated areas of inquiry: (1) Ecocriticism and Critical Island and Empire Studies; (2) Conflict and Violence; (3) Care Work, and; (4) Critical Mediations, focusing on curatorial and artistic practices, productions, and initiatives committed to political story-telling. Through this diverse range of activities, participants inquired into problems faced by many societies in Asia, as these manifest particularly in the Philippine context: inequality, poverty, and generalized precarity, militarized discourses and state violence, development aggression, imperial and neocolonial politics and economies of extraction (including not only of natural resources, but also digital and academic extractivism), and responses to climate emergency and other planetary conditions of crisis and vulnerability. In advancing knowledge and discussions on these topics, we also sought to highlight and support the work of collectives involved in human rights activism, community-based art practices, public education, and capacity-building across classes, communities, and localities by partnering with or reaching out to representatives of organizations like DAKILA, RESBAK, and Good Food Community; independent publishers such as Gantala Press, Paper Trail Projects, and Magpies Press, and; university-based cultural institutions such as the Vargas Museum and the Parola Gallery. Bookending sessions that foregrounded cultural practices and productions as critical interventions toward social change were lectures and panel discussions that defined, contextualized, and problematized “Inter-Asia Cultural Studies” as an ethos of committed knowledge production, a social and intellectual movement, a field, framework, and/or method of inquiry, a school of thought, and a community of practice for a constellation of research frameworks, questions, perspectives, approaches, and methods deployed under the banner of what Chua Beng Huat (2015) termed “inter-Asian referencing.” To encourage the students to converse with each other and do things together beyond classroom-bound engagements, we incorporated informal, small-group discussions in the ten-day program, which concluded with a memory walk around the UP Diliman campus in the morning, and group presentations by summer school participants about the work that they had collectively done throughout the summer school in the afternoon.
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Program highlights mentioned by participants in their feedback include core academic sessions on inter-Asia cultural studies and methodologies, with lectures by Chih-Ming Wang, Chua Beng Huat, and Tejaswini Niranjana, and roundtable discussions with Thiti Jamkajornkeiat, Fran Martin, Madhuja Mukherjee, Judy Ick, Nishant Shah, and Yukari Yoshihara; talks on archipelagic and island poetics and ecocriticism by Elmo Gonzaga, Glenn Diaz, Oscar Campomanes, Christian Benitez, and Timothy Ong; presentations on community-based art practices by Rimi Khan and Conchitina Cruz; the talks by Nishant Shah on information overload and analytical frameworks for understanding the digital; the lecture by Maria Carmen Fernandez on practice-based research and engaged scholarship; gallery walk-throughs and curator talks by Tessa Maria Guazon of the Vargas Museum and Lisa Ito-Tapang of Parola; screenings of the documentaries Aswang (2019), Alunsina (2020), and Delikado (2022) about the social costs of the “war on drugs” co-organized with DAKILA – Active Vista; a conversation facilitated by Erika Yasmin Beldia of RESBAK with women bereaved by the drug war; a roundtable on feminist care work with Faye Cura, Mabi David, and Anna Felicia Sanchez, and; workshops that gave participants opportunities for co-creation, specifically the zine-making activity facilitated by Adam David and Magpies Press, vocal improvisation facilitated by Anjeline de Dios, and the counter-memory and solidarity walk facilitated by Irish Deocampo, Julie Jolo, and Augusto Ledesma.
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Reflecting on her experience of the summer school upon its conclusion, Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra wrote, “What remains with me isn’t so much one particular event or activity, but the depth and breadth of sessions and workshops offered … this assemblage of events made me consider how my own scholarship might be more multifaceted and incorporate other forms of knowledge production. I also appreciated the movement from more lecture-based events during the first week and more hands-on events (e.g., zine-making, art-making, breath work, presentations) during the second week when collective cerebral energies were starting to wane.” Another participant, Yenbo Kuo, shared that he found the informal small-group discussions to be “very important as they provide participants with sufficient time to interact with each other. They also offer an opportunity for those who might not have fully grasped the lectures due to language barriers or other reasons to catch up with the discussion.” Although the students’ participation in various activities varied according to their personal interests and comfort with the medium of English, their presence to one another was integral for mutual recognition and sharing, collective learning, and knowledge-formation. As Yenbo Kuo wrote, “the key to ‘communication’ may not necessarily lie in accurately conveying ideas to others but in the willingness to listen. This might be why our physical presence at this event is meaningful. … Regardless of the language used, even if comprehension is partial, there remains a benevolent curiosity. … when trying to explain our differences to other Asian friends in this inter-Asia setting, the willingness to listen and discuss increases. The very ability to achieve this, and to continue expanding this kind of benevolence, is the value that this knowledge community offers.”
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The 2024 IACS Summer School is the first in-person summer school held by the IACS Society since 2018, given that the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic led to the cancellation of the 2020 Summer School that was supposed to be hosted by Okinawa University, while the 2022 Summer School organized by Universiti Malaya had to be conducted online. The 2024 IACS Summer School is also the first event of its kind to be organized and hosted by the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the University of the Philippines Diliman. While our department has hosted numerous international conferences before, we had not organized an academic event with a curated program featuring lectures, film screenings, field trips, workshops, and performances scheduled over the course of two weeks, involving 45 graduate students in residence on campus and 30 resource persons from over 15 countries. In the year that we spent planning and organizing the summer school, we encountered various challenges, including resource and scheduling constraints. These, coupled with the nascent institutionalization of cultural studies in Philippine academia, ultimately led to a program that leaned more toward Philippine studies rather than patently “inter-Asia” cultural studies work. Nevertheless, in gathering resources, building infrastructures for conversation, and convening scholars from the region and beyond, we hoped that our work would facilitate inter-Asian engagements, that even as participants deepened their knowledge about a specific problem faced by a specific community in the Philippines, they would also be able to draw links to their own experiences in their own contexts and communities of knowledge and practice.
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Such work is necessary and generative, particularly in light of contemporary movements to “decolonize” disciplines. The humanities and social sciences until now largely look to ideas, thinkers, canons, schools, standards, funding sources, networking platforms, and publication media located in or produced by Anglo-American and European research and higher education institutions and traditions when conducting scholarship. The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies project, both as an intellectual movement and a regional association of institutions and scholars, proposes that we look to our neighboring countries and thinkers in Asia as reference points for research, pedagogy, and scholarly community, instead of maintaining a kind of intellectual dependence on globally dominant knowledge hubs, most of which are located in the West (as annual higher education rankings and publication indices reveal). Such a project requires resource-building for the creation of more spaces, opportunities, and institutions where intellectuals based in Asia can encounter each other and work together to address problems that transcend disciplinary silos and national borders. The IACS Summer Schools affirm that this is not just an academic exercise, but a worthwhile political and pedagogical endeavor, for “Inter-Asia Cultural Studies” denotes not just a set of ideas, canonical texts or canonizing publications, higher-education institutions, or methodologies, but a dynamic thing, collectively moved by the thinking and doing and interlinking of people who are present to one another.
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Acknowledgments
The 2024 IACS Summer School was made possible through the funding support of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society, the University of the Philippines (UP) System Office of International Linkages (OIL) Supported Constituent Unit Hosting of International Conferences Grant and World Expert Lecture Series (WELS) Grant, the Office of the Chancellor of UP Diliman, the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Letters, and the Japan Foundation Arts and Culture Grant.
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The author thanks all the participants who shared their experiences and feedback on the summer school, both through survey form responses and email. The reflections by Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra, Hong Zou, Yenbo Kuo, and Nurul Muthmainnah quoted in this essay are included with their permission.
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The full summer school program booklet may be viewed at https://bit.ly/2024IACSbooklet.
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References
Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 2010. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Duke University Press.
Chen, Kuan-hsing. 2016. “Inter-Asia Journal Work.” Small Axe 20 (2 (50)): 106–114. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-3626620.
Chua, Beng Huat. 2015. “Inter-Asia referencing and shifting frames of comparison.” In The Social Sciences in the Asian Century, edited by Carol Johnson, Vera Mackie, and Tessa Morris-Suzuki. Australian National University Press.
Niranjana, Tejaswini. 2015. “Introduction.” In Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, edited by Tejaswini Niranjana and Xiaoming Wang. Orient Black Swan.
Wang, Chih-ming. “‘Inter-Asia’ Methods: Movement, Translation, and Summer School.” Paper presented at the 2024 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City, August 5, 2024.