EVENTS

The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) is a scholarly, non-political, non-profit professional association, open to all persons interested in Asia. With over 7,000 members worldwide, representing all the regions and countries of Asia and all academic disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, the AAS is the largest organization of its kind. The AAS-in-ASIA platform provides the opportunity to interested scholars and others in Asian Studies to participate on panel sessions and network with colleagues in a more intimate setting.

Friday, July 6

Session 62: Evaluating Labour in Contemporary Asia: Concepts and Contexts 

The five-member panel was organised and chaired by Anand P. Krishnan, Institute of Chinese Studies. He presented his work on Understanding Informality and Precarity in Workplace relations: From a China-India Lens. Another panelists were from Jwaharlal Nehru University and Tata Institute of Social Sciences.                                                                                                             

Saturday, July 7

Special Roundtable 3 - Shifting Genealogies and Geographies of Fieldwork: AAS Presidents’ Roundtable

In this session, seasoned fieldworkers: Queeny Pradhan, Katherine Bowie, Manoranjan Mohanty, Laurel Kendall and Anne Feldhaus from three different disciplines discuss some of the directions contemporary fieldwork is taking, describing their own encounters with the messiness of fieldwork in the process.

Political Scientist Manoranjan Mohanty, who has carried out fieldwork in Hela Township in Wuxi, China for nearly four decades, has had to devise strategies to cope with not only the fast process of change on the ground in rural policies and practices but also the gap between the questions that he was interested in pursuing – such as inequality, gender, and participation – and the the questions the authorities were preoccupied with, such as figures on growth, industrialisation and urban development. Historian Queeny Pradhan has been conducting historical fieldwork in the hill stations of India, drawing upon archival sources and oral histories. Anthropologist Laurel Kendall began as a solitary fieldworker in a Korean village, but found herself at mid-life experiencing the pleasures and pitfalls of team-based research with colleagues in Vietnam.