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Shaping Asia: Knowledge Production and Circulation

Subject Area Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
Term from 2019 to 2024
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 428875336
 
Final Report Year 2025

Final Report Abstract

The postcolonial critique, which still informs globalisation and transregional research in social sciences and humanities, has not only challenged global hierarchies and the modalities of knowledge that stabilise them, but has also instigated fruitful debates on the production and circulation of knowledge in the postcolonial era while expanding the debate on what is to be understood as ‘knowledge’. Preoccupations with power hierarchies between and within regions also address the sites where knowledge is created, acquires legitimacy, and is negotiated. Postcolonial scholarship on Asia redirects its attention towards the dynamics within Asia, at different scales and sites, along with its relations with different regions of the world. Intellectual deliberations on these power dynamics result in questioning and redirecting claims to valid knowledge, while the search for and engagement with alternatives has empowering effects. In this vein, insights on how individual and collective actors exist in complex realms of knowledge as well as their positionings within knowledge regimes acquire more and more importance. The network of scholars involved in the project ‘Shaping Asia: Knowledge Production and Circulation’ understands Asia to be a region in which (post)colonial domination and the manifold ways in which it has been questioned and scrutinised are linked to the very nature of knowledge production and circulation – as it simultaneously seeks to grasp how Asia is shaped in this process. All over the world, scholars increasingly argue for a fundamental reappraisal and reorganisation of knowledge production. They propose that intellectual and cultural inequalities are part and parcel of socioeconomic inequalities and highly unequal geopolitics at different scales. As Levitt and Crul (2018) argue, there is a necessity for critical evaluation of the central premises of knowledge production, of careful assessment of that which is silenced, what is considered legitimate, or what is given centre stage. These alternative ways of shaping the world are taken to be relational and situated, empowering and constraining. The first area of the project addressed critical questioning in the frameworks of postcolonial and neoliberal critique, reflecting upon the situated character of knowledge production and circulation; the second area was dedicated to understanding alternative discourses in and about the generation of knowledge in Asia; tracing alternative practices of knowledge dissemination – especially in learning and schooling –, and exploring forms of embodied, emotional, and sensorial knowledge in Asian perspectives. The third area traced entanglements such as connectivities made through knowledge production and circulation in Asia and beyond as well as ways how knowledge shapes interconnections and how it is changed as it travels.

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