Conference: Borderlands of Becoming, Belonging, and Sharing

The International Academic Forum in conjunction with its global partners
including the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia is proud to
announce the Fourth Asian Conference on Asian Studies, to be held from May
29-June 1, at the Rihga Royal Hotel and the adjoining Osaka International
Conference Center.

Conference Theme: Borderlands of Becoming, Belonging and Sharing

Local, national and global cultures have been transformed by an
intensification of human migration, mobility and multi-culture with
multiple and complex claims of home, identity and belonging. Gloria
Anzaldua?s idea of the borderland has become a critical conceptual rubric
used by cultural researchers as a way of understanding, explaining and
articulating the in-determined, vague, ambiguous nature of everyday life
and the cultural politics of border-knowledge, border crossings,
transgression, living in-between and multiple belongings. Borderlands is
also about a social space where people of diverse backgrounds and
identities meet and share a space in which the politics of co-presence and
co-existence are experienced and enacted in mundane ways. This conference,
which focuses on the borderlands of becoming, belonging and sharing, is
therefore about examining how the culture of everyday life is regulated and
contested across diverse political, economic and social contexts, and!
 whether and how it creates spaces of belonging with others.

The aim of this conference theme is to open up discussion, critical
reflection and analysis about emerging social, political and cultural
identities that are formed at the intersection of multiple and multi-sited
belongings and their expression and about the possibility of making them
shared across differences. We welcome papers that focus on (but not limited
to):

* Trans-cultural displacement/belonging
* Belonging and the intersections of gender, race, religion, sexuality
* Seeking refuge, unruly belonging(s) and border politics
* Trauma and joy of becoming and belonging
* Communication, new technologies and belonging
* Cultural narratives of belonging/not belonging
* Cultural politics of survival/transgression
* New imaginings/formations of home
* Citizenship beyond borders
* Multicultural exhaustion/renewal
* Belonging in the Anthropocene
* Multiple and complex belongings
* Re-locating culture across borders
* Convivial cultures and the imagined communities
* Creation of shared space(s) of multiple belongings

Submission Procedure General Information

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be submitted by February 1, 2014.
All abstracts will be blind reviewed by a voluntary team, and authors will
usually be notified of the decision of the reviewers within two weeks of
submission. Those who submit near the February deadline will receive
confirmation of acceptance or rejection by February 15, 2014.

All accepted authors may have their full paper published in the online
conference proceedings. Full text submission is due by July 1, 2014.

The deadline for full conference payment for all presenters is May 1, 2014.

For the detail, please visit: http://acas.iafor.org/

We hope that the 2014 conference theme will encourage academic and personal
encounters and exchanges across national, religious, cultural and
disciplinary divides. We look forward to seeing you (again) in Osaka!

Professor Baden Offord
Professor of Cultural Studies & Human Rights, Southern Cross University,
Australia
ACCS/ACAS 2014 Conference Chair

Professor Koichi Iwabuchi
Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, Monash University, Australia
Director of the Monash University Asia Institute
ACCS/ACAS 2014 Conference Co-Chair