CfP: The Alien Forms of Global Asias Writing
Since 2015, the award-winning journal Verge and the Global Asias Initiative have been exploring how Global Asias knowledge production can reshape the academic landscape. Our work over the past decade has shown us that Global Asias is more than an opportunity to question the institutional structures that historically disarticulate area studies from ethnic studies and diaspora studies. Global Asias is also an opportunity to reimagine how—and in what forms—we write. To think about knowledge differently, one must enact it differently. To think about and with something as vast, unwieldy, and mercurial as Global Asias, we explore forms of knowledge production that are collaborative and polyvocal, forms that invite individual scholars to suspend their standard operating procedures.
As Tina Chen argues, Global Asias can be provocatively approached as an alien form, “forms of writing and professional enactment that 1) engage the genres in which they are working speculatively, 2) leverage the conceptual possibilities of generic frictions to create structural dissonance, 3) challenge the distinctions that disarticulate research, teaching, and service orientations, 4) embrace the synergistic possibilities of cross-pollinating epistemologies and practices across institutional taxonomies of scholarly labor, and 5) support the formation of new assemblages of scholarly labor whose value isn’t overdetermined by existing institutional definitions of teaching, research, and service.”
In conceptualizing this project, we draw on a very successful history of using a scaffolded approach to building networks, communities, and multi-faceted scholarly engagement. In addition to developing program-building efforts at the 2025 Global Asias Summer Institute, we are partnering with the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and are soliciting contributions for a proposed AAS Asia Shorts volume planned in conjunction that showcases unconventional forms of scholarly writing. We invite contributors to work outside of the generic constraints that govern academic writing and to explore how a capaciously imagined scholarly praxis can generate capaciously imagined modes of scholarly writing. Global Asias as a multidisciplinary, trans-field, and cooperative venture encourages us to experiment with unconventional forms of scholarship—what Verge has pioneered as convergences, non-traditional genres of academic writing that are collaborative, polyvocal, generically hybrid, and structurally dissonant.
For this volume, we welcome innovative Global Asias scholarship that challenges the divides that separate teaching, research, and service as distinct academic activities; that explores the possibilities of working across critical and creative modes of articulation; that crosses or combines different genres and forms; that invents new ways of “doing” scholarship; and/or that creates alternative structures for making legible the collaborative ethos of Global Asias as method and praxis. We welcome writing that is exploratory and speculative, playful and inquisitive, thought-provoking and unsettled.
To submit, please upload the following items as a single pdf file to the submission form by September 15, 2025.
- A statement of 150 words outlining how the submission responds to the volume’s project;
- A current c.v. (no longer than 2 pp);
- The submission (since we’re looking for work that challenges the conventions of academic writing, we have decided not to put page or word count limits on this).
Inquiries regarding the Institutional Forms of Global Asias (IFGA) project and the Asia Shorts volume may be directed to co-editors Tina Chen (tina.chen[at]psu.edu) and Charlotte Eubanks (cde13[at]psu.edu).
More information and submission form at https://sites.psu.edu/vergeglobalasias/2024/10/09/cfp-the-alien-forms-of-global-asias-writing/.