| Workshop, 5/09/2012 |
New Directions in Area Studies
Workshop with James Sidaway (Singapore)
The critical discussion about the traditions, theoretical and methodological frameworks as well as functions of area studies has led to profound efforts to reposition them in a new academic landscape. Whereas this year’s PhD summer school of the Graduate Centre Humanities and Social Sciences provides a broader forum for this discussion, an additional in-depth workshop with James Sidaway – one the most renowned political geographers, who has recently committed his efforts to rethink the relation between area studies, globalization and space – gives room for individual project discussion. The workshop is designed for PhD students of the Research Academy Leipzig who are pursuing projects from an area studies perspective, or who engage with area studies expertise in one way or the other, and who would like to discuss their particular research against the background of this problematic.
The workshop offers input from Prof. Sidaway as well as a discussion of articles circulated in advance, while focusing on the student’s presentation of their work-in-progress with a special emphasis on the following questions: how these studies can be positioned in an area studies context and how they have to cope with this framework or might offer new perspectives to the field, be it methodologically, spatially or empirically.
Biographical Note: Before becoming Professor for Political Geography at the National University of Singapore, James Sidaway has been Professor of Political and Cultural Geography at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) and Professor in Human Geography at Plymouth University (United Kingdom). He has edited and authored a number of fundamental books in political and human geography, together with colleagues as well as individually, such as the textbook An Introduction to Human Geography (2001, 2012), with J.R.J. Johnston Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American Human Geography since 1945 (2004), and Imagined Regional Communities: Integration and Sovereignty in the Global South (2002). His research interests include states, cities and geopolitics, as well as the history and philosophy of geographic thought. He has undertaken field work in Southern Africa, Western Europe, parts of Southeast Asia and the Persian Gulf. |
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