HCIAS Colloquium – Dialogues Across World Regions Rethinking Regions: Cultural Formations and Circulation Through and Across Cultural Boundaries

The intellectual formation of “area studies” has been subject to significant critique in the early twenty-first century; at the same time, intellectual work continues to be grounded in particular regions and understandings of regions. This is a necessary feature of historically-tuned, highly contextualized work which is usually intertwined with locally embedded research questions. Such a tension is not, therefore, to be dismissed easily. At the same time, we know that the cultural formations are intimately linked to a broad range of cultural practices across a wide geographic range. Furthermore, we are only beginning to study the relation between the vernacular and the regional as well as the cross- or trans-regional. Can we effectively combine attention to regional particularity with a concern for broader historical connections and cultural formations? In which ways could a trans-regional reading enhance our understanding of specific regions, adding complexity to how we understand the local and particular?