Area Studies at the Crossroads

I   Introduction: Area studies at the Crossroads      

 

1. From Spatial Containers to Studying the Mobile  

Anna-Katharina Hornidge & Katja Mielke    

 

2. Challenging spatialities of knowledge under globalisation: Strategic responses to the neoliberal university and its role in entrenching the global immobility of theory production    

Peter A. Jackson   

 

II   To be or not to be is not the question. Rethinking Area Studies in its own right   



3. Area studies @ Southeast Asia: Concepts and directions for an emerging field of regional science

Christoph Antweiler

 

4. Rethinking "Middle Eastern" Studies post-Arab revolts: Analytical and conceptual queries and propositions

Ali Fathollah-Nejad

 

5. Rethinking the Americas: Entanglement and (De-)Colonization of Space and Knowledge

Olaf Kaltmeier

 

6. Are transregional studies the future of Area Studies?

Matthias Middell

 

III   Mobility, immobility, and positionality in rethinking Area Studies

 

7. The society of betweenness: Migration and identities of migrants as identities in motion

Bianca Boteva-Richter

 

8. Positionality at the crossroads: Gendered lifeworlds, social situatedness and the relational production of place in the context of student migration to Gilgit, Pakistan

Andreas Benz

 

9. Red lines for uncivilised trade?: Fixity, mobility and position on Almaty's changing bazaars

Henryk Alff

 

10. There and Back Again. Late German Repatriates at Eurasia's Crossroads

Markus Kaiser & Michael Schoenhuth

 

11. Social (im-)mobility at the margins of rural society in Punjab: Vartan bhanji-exchange practices and coping strategies

Aftab Nasir

Katja Mielke (Dr. phil.) is Senior Researcher at the Germany-based think tank BICC, a peace and conflict research institute in Bonn. Trained in Social Sciences, East European, and Central Asian Studies, she was one of the initiators of the Germany-wide research network 'Crossroads Asia' for rethinking area studies.

Anna-Katharina Hornidge (Dr. phil.) is Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Bremen, Germany, as well as Head of Department of Social Sciences and of the Working Group 'Development and Knowledge Sociology' at the Leibniz-Center for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), Germany. Trained in Sociology and Southeast Asian Studies, she scientifically coordinated 'Crossroads Asia' from 2012 to 2014 and was responsible for designing the networks strategy for synthesizing the conducted research. Today, she remains part of the Executive Board of the network.