Critical Connections: Forum on Cultural Studies in Asia and Beyond
16 March 2012, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand
CONFERENCE KEYNOTE SCHOLAR AND GUEST SPEAKER
Distinguished Keynote Speakers
Professor CHUA Beng Huat (National University of Singapore)
email: <aricbh@nus.edu.sg>
"Conceptualization and Referencing in Cultural Studies in Asia"
Cultural Studies in Asia has been developing quite rapidly in the past decade. However, it remains largely an empirical enterprise with little impact at the conceptual level of the field of Cultural Studies as such. This is because most Asia-based scholars are still in the habit of taking ready-to-hand concepts, which are largely abstractions from the West, and applying them to local empirical material. It is argued in this presentation that if Cultural Studies in Asia is to have an expanded position in the global archive of Cultural Studies then, the next necessary step is the development of concepts that emerge out of the empirical richness of the local context, with the aim of universalizing such concepts through frequent inter-referencing among Asian scholars.
| CHUA Beng Huat has been Provost Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Social Science, National University of Singapore since 2009. He also holds a joint appointment as the Cultural Studies in Asia Research Cluster Leader, at the Asia Research Institute at NUS. He has held visiting professorships at universities in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Germany, Australia and the US. During his Distinguished Visiting Scholar Fellowship at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, he delivered the Inaugural Lecture of the Carolina Asia Center. In the area of Cultural Studies his major publications include: Life is Not Complete without Shopping; as editor, Elections as Popular Culture in Asia, as co-editor Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader, East Asian Pop Culture: Analyzing the Korean Wave. In addition to being on the editorial board of many international social science and cultural studies journals, he is founding co-executive editor of the journal, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (London: Routledge). His forthcoming book is entitled, Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture. |