2024 Situations International Conference 22-23 November, 2024Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea Asian Diaspora in the 21st Century:Transnational Hauntology and Affective Production  Scholars have extensively debated the meaning and significance of diaspora. At their inception, classic diaspora studies considered a racial or ethnic group’s dispersal caused by religious difference, the Jewish people being the archetype in understanding diaspora. The scope of modern diaspora studies has been expanded to embrace emancipatory politics and the exploration of various conditions of racial, ethnic, and political minorities. Contemporary diaspora is characterized by fragmentation, dislocation, and globalization, and these new features must be clearly redefined and analyzed. Non-European diaspora experience, Asian diaspora in particular, has not been extensively explored. Raising questions about the magnitude and the limited destinations of Korean migration being identified as a diaspora, Gerard Chaliand and Jean Pierre Rageau argue that “the total number of overseas Koreans lacks the massive proportions of a typical diaspora, such as the Irish case, in which more than half of the population emigrated from their homeland” (1995). Should we define an ethnic group’s diaspora through size or distance? Doesn’t the atypicality of the Korean diaspora call for a retheorization of diaspora today? A small group of migrants may have felt themselves to be in a precarious situation in the 19th and 20th centuries, but in the 21st century, diasporic subjects have multiple ways of retaining contact with their communities of origin, thanks to advances in communication technology and frequent air travel. Contemporary diasporas in the 21st century can be characterized by varieties of diasporic experience that no longer necessitate a permanent break from one’s homeland. The consciousness of being a diasporic subject may no longer depend as much on a physical and geographic separation from a homeland. What does diasporic consciousness mean then in a world where contact and even return to the homeland is possible? And turning away from the attention of ethnicity or race on diaspora to the emotional experience of being unsettled, displaced, and haunted, may unveil a greater understanding of our being in the 21st century. Playing on the concept of ontology and resonating with his lifelong project of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida suggests by the term, hauntology, how to engage ghosts and historical remnants from the past. (Hau)ntology is a neologism that reminds us that we are always displaced and unhomed. When diasporic subjects seek to break away from their past, it can always come back to haunt their present experience associated with mixed feelings of melancholia, rage, alienation, anomie, and hopefulness for a better future. The displaced subjects’ affective production transcending the limited ties of kinship and nation can mediate the deterritorialized humanity in the 21st century. Situations (Volume 18, No. 1, 2025) calls for papers that explore concepts of migration and diaspora in the 21st century and/or papers that examine literary and cultural content representing, mediating, or rearticulating the diasporic consciousness of Asian diaspora communities. Possible topics:·      Contemporary diasporas: North Korean defectors, the Zainichi community, the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, and the South Asian diaspora in African and Arab states·      diasporic consciousness: displacement and lost land, homeland and host land·      language barriers and linguistic isolation·      citizenship and sense of belonging·      the myth and politics of return·      refugee camps, resettlement, and national borders·      gendered experience within diasporic communities·      inter-Asian migration and politics of asylum·      the problem of collective memory in diasporic communities·      assimilation and de-assimilation in one’s adopted land·      diaspora and the “blue humanities” centered on oceans and seas  Confirmed Keynote Speakers:Chua Beng Huat, Professor Emeritus in Department of Sociology, National University of SingaporeJohn Lie, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, U.C. BerkeleySo-young Kim, Professor of Cinema Studies, Korea National University of Arts  Early inquiries with 200-word abstracts are appreciated. By 31 August 2024, we would invite you to submit your 4,000-word Chicago-style conference presentation with its abstract and keywords (the acceptance of the presentation will be decided based on the 4,000-paper). Each invited participant is then expected to turn his or her conference presentation into a finished 6,000-word paper for possible inclusion in a future issue of the SCOPUS-indexed journal, Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context. All inquiries and submissions should be sent to both situations@yonsei.ac.kr and skrhee@yonsei.ac.kr. Submissions should follow the Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.), using only endnotes. Notes:We will pay for the hotel accommodation for those participants whose papers we accept. The presenters will share twin bedrooms.

2024 Situations International ConferenceCall for PapersKorean Cultural Centre, UK1~3 February 2024 Minor Diasporas in Asia and Beyond From contemporary news media, we receive daily reminders of the current global migration crisis. By some estimates, there are two-hundred seventy million migrants in the world today, roughly 3.5 percent of the world’s population. Although the most trafficked borders traversed (or not) by migrants are well-known, standing at various points of contact between the Global North and the Global South, some of the routes of migration are less well documented. Examples of what Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih called “minor transnationalism,” the diasporas at the end of these routes, or more frequently these days at a midpoint along the way, in turn develop in less familiar ways and are perhaps surprising when they emerge as objects of focus. Take for example Zainichi Koreans in Osaka, Vietnamese refugees in New Orleans, ethnic Bangladeshi in Detroit, the North Korean enclave in London, Senegalese migrants in Nicaragua. Even more liminal are the communities of migrants stalled at the border in places like Juarez, Lesvos, and Tangier, unable to reach their desired destination. While it is true that all diasporas by their very nature constitute a site of minority, we may regard these examples as doubly minoritized, that is, as situated in subordinate relation to the dominant culture in the geographies they occupy and as well to the discourse through which diasporas become more widely intelligible. In this context, this conference invites papers that expand the terrain of thought on contemporary migration by considering examples of Korean and other Asian migrant routes and communities, past or present, that may offer insight, by way of both similarity and contrast, into what has become one of the defining humanitarian crises in the world today. Papers that focus on Korean or other Asian diasporas around the world are welcome. Possible topics:North Koreans within and without South KoreaAnti-communist branding“Minor” migrant literature, media, and artCultures of inter-Asian migrationRural/urban migration dynamicsIllegality, trafficking, statelessnessNetworks and loopholesStateless subjects and communitiesState sovereignty and states of exceptionEthics of minor diasporas and minor diasporic encountersMinor globalization, minor postcolonialism“Minor” futures and pastsCartographies of minor diasporasVisualizing border crossings Keynotes:Dr. Chris Berry (King’s College London) Dr. Junyoung Verónica Kim (University of Pittsburgh) Early inquiries with 200-word abstracts are appreciated. By 15 January 2024, we would invite you to submit your 4,000-word Chicago-format conference presentation with its abstract and keywords (the acceptance of the presentation will be decided based on the 4,000-paper). Each invited participant is then expected to turn his or her conference presentation into a finished 6,000-word paper for possible inclusion in a future issue of the SCOPUS-indexed journal, Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context. All inquiries and submissions should be sent to both situations@yonsei.ac.kr and skrhee@yonsei.ac.kr. Submissions should follow the Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.), using only endnotes. Venue: Korean Cultural Centre, London, UK Notes:We will pay for the hotel accommodation for those participants whose papers we accept. The presenters will share twin bedrooms. Cohosted by Korean Cultural Centre UK, UCI Center for Critical Korean Studies, Yonsei University BK21 Project, Situations  

Call for Papers: 2023 Situations International Conference Neoliberal Asia and Its Precarious Others October 20-21, Grand Hyatt Jeju, South Korea The modern history of Asia has been characterized by rapid and even spectacular growth, as societies that were poor and agrarian became prosperous and advanced through the process of state-led development. But the much-vaunted successes of the developmental state have often served to conceal intractable problems and troubling realities. The neoliberal economic model has exacerbated inequalities across the globe, and Asia has not been spared the pernicious dynamic whereby a few have achieved tremendous wealth while many more have fallen out of the middle class and are confronted with an increasingly gloomy and uncertain future. Precarity has driven these issues to the fore, as the loss of faith in the future has come to unsettle and weaken social cohesion in Asia just as it has dissolved it across the West. This conference examines the experience of precarity in Asia, past and present. Whether it relates to contract laborers working without benefits, migrants seeking low-wage jobs, the physically handicapped cut off from steady employment, the neuro-diverse negotiating the rules of corporate culture, or gays and lesbians carving out a niche in a traditional society, Situations welcomes papers from a wide variety of perspectives taking on these and other issues related to the worsening instability of social structures and the spread of uncertainty in traditionally communitarian Asian societies. How have members of marginal or disenfranchised groups responded to the predicaments of precarity, and how are views of these groups changing among the general public? What kind of politics are emerging in response to mass disillusionment regarding a better future, and what kind of influence are disenfranchised groups beginning to exert against the forces arrayed against them? Could precarity also provide opportunities for marginalized groups that did not exist in the past? Invited Speakers: ·      Dr. Rey Chow (Duke University)“Democracy or Totalitarianism? Terms of the New Cold War” ·      Dr. Lisa Yoneyama (University of Toronto)“Thresholds of Precarity” ·      Dr. Youngmin Choe (USC)“The Viscous Return of the Rheol”  Possible topics might include: ·      labor and precarity·      disability rights·      migrant workers in Asia·      precarity and the shaping of biopolitics·      the crisis of the low birth-rate·      the emergence of neuro-diversity (such as Extraordinary Attorney Woo)·      the transformation of family life·      gender identity in uncertain times·      cults as a phenomenon of precarity·      Squid Game and other metaphors of precarity·      environmental politics and the loss of the future·      precarity and the experience of deep time·      the impact of the Old and the New Cold War·      lives under authoritarian regimes  Early inquiries with 200-word abstracts are appreciated. By 20 August 2023, we would invite you to submit your 4,000-word Chicago-format conference presentation with its abstract and keywords (the acceptance of the presentation will be decided based on the 4,000-paper). Each invited participant will then be expected to turn his or her conference presentation into a finished 6,000-word paper for possible inclusion in a future issue of the SCOPUS-indexed journal, Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context. All inquiries and submissions should be sent to both situations@yonsei.ac.kr and skrhee@yonsei.ac.kr. Submissions should follow the Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.), using only endnotes. Venue: Grand Hyatt Jeju (https://www.hyatt.com/en-US/hotel/south-korea/grand-hyatt-jeju/cjugh) Notes:We will pay the hotel accommodation for those participants whose final papers we accept. The presenters will share twin bedrooms.