The 8th. Annual Meeting 2016 Introduction

Society for Cultural Interaction in East Asia The 8th. General Assembly and The 8th. Annual Meeting 2016 “A New Path for East Asian Cultural Interaction Studies”

The modern period in East Asia was a time of cultural clash and circulation of knowledge. The arrival of Jesuits in the sixteenth century and of Protestant missionaries in the early nineteenth century brought new European knowledge to China, while the encroachment of Western powers also constituted a challenge to East Asian traditions. Faced with the waves of European learning that were inundating Asia, the traditional Sino-centric pattern of knowledge transmission, acceptance, and interaction that had continued intact for hundreds and thousands of years underwent dramatic and fundamental change. The elites of Asia responded to the disruption, dismay, confusion, and struggles engendered by contact with European culture by using writing, translation, and images to spread new ideas and knowledge. The adoption of modern knowledge would fundamentally transform the cultural, historiographical, linguistic, and literary landscape of Asia. In the twenty-first century, which has already seen the growth of globalization and the rapid economic development of East Asia, the cultural encounters, joint activities, and interactions among East Asian nations or within the geographical sphere of Asia have become central concerns of East Asian scholarship, attracting the wide-ranging interest of scholars from all over the world. Scholars have begun to ponder: What is the nature of East Asian modernity? How have traditional intellectual frameworks been reconfigured during the course of modernization?
A vertical axis of East Asian research provides a microcosmic view of the development of human society, while a horizontal axis, through its supra-cultural, supra-regional, and interdisciplinary perspectives, encourages us to ponder the position and significance of East Asia within the breadth of world history. In view of this, we began preparing for the first annual meeting of the Society for Cultural Interaction in East Asia in 2006, which was held in May, 2007. The research outlook of the Society when it was first founded can be summarized in three keywords: interaction, which we use to stress mutual interaction; circulation, which signifies the complicated nature of the movement of knowledge; and periphery, which encapsulates the methodology in which we observe the center from the periphery, utilizing the texts of the periphery to interpret the center. Our perspective has gained the enthusiastic support of many scholars, and the 2016 annual meeting of the SCIEA will be a milestone marking the successful completion of our first decade. Ten years will have passed in an instant. In order to create a truly new and innovative academic discipline, we must look back on our first decade with a critical eye and sum up our achievements. We hope that carefully re-examining old texts, discovering new evidence, and applying new theories in order to interpret the history and culture of East Asia will inspire fresh approaches and present new challenges for future studies of East Asian cultural interaction.
Kansai University is set to host the 2016 annual meeting as one of the 130th Anniversary of its founding projects. We plan to focus on cultural interaction and use interdisciplinary approaches to methodology, material evidence, and texts, as well as digitalization as tools in order to further the discussion. By so doing, we expect to promote research into this new area.
It is our hope that you honor us with your participation so that together we may make new contributions to the field of East Asian studies.

Theme this Year

A New Path for East Asian Cultural Interaction Studies

Panel Themes

1. A New Cultural History in East Asia: Texts and Personalities
2. Modern Society and Folk Beliefs in East Asia
3. Various Issues in Research on East Asian Intellectual History from the Perspective of Cultural Interaction Studies
4. Construct of Modern Academic Systems in East Asia
5. Formation and Development of a Modern Historical View in East Asia
6. Research on Modern Intellectual History and New Cultural History in East Asia
7. Construction and Management of Specialized Databases
8. Digitalization of Ancient Texts in the Fields of Literary and Historical Research
9. Big Data and Research on Early Modern East Asia
10. Other Themes related to Cultural Interaction Studies in East Asia

Meeting Schedule

Arrival: May 6, 2016 (Friday)
Annual Meeting: May 7-8, 2016 (Saturday and Sunday)
Departure: May 9, 2016 (Monday)

Application Schedule and Announcement of Selections

The meeting will take the form of keynote addresses, individual panel sessions, individual presentations, and papers by PhD candidates. We encourage Society members to refer to the separate list of panel sessions to decide which one to join. Each panel will be allotted one hour and forty minutes, and will have one moderator and one to two commentators. Presenters may also serve as moderators or commentators. Please submit the application form and an abstract (not more than 400 characters) if you wish to participate.

docApplication form  (docx)　（Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean）

Deadline for application submission is January 8, 2016. We will send out formal invitations at a later date.

Expenses

All participants who are not invited guests are responsible for their own roundtrip transportation and lodging expenses. Conference participation is ￥6,000 for full members and ￥3,000 for student members. Please pay in cash (Japanese yen) on site.

To Apply for Participation, Contact:

The Organizing Committee for the 8th Annual Meeting of the Society for Cultural Interaction in East Asia (sciea2016@outlook.com)

Head Organizer:
Uchida Keiichi, Vice-President (Professor in the Faculty of Foreign Languages, Kansai University)
Auxiliary Organizers:
Wang Min, President (Professor, Hōsei University Research Center for International Japanese Studies)
Fujita Takao, Councilor (Professor in the Faculty of Literature, Kansai University)
Matsuura Akira, Councilor (Professor in the Faculty of Literature, Kansai University)
Tao De-min, Councilor (Professor in the Faculty of Literature, Kansai University)
Nakatani Nobuo (Professor in the Faculty of Literature, Kansai University)
Azuma Jūji (Professor in the Faculty of Literature, Kansai University)
Secretary:
Shen Guowei, Secretary General (Professor in the Faculty of Foreign Language Studies, Kansai University)