DECL, DSCTA hold IACS Summer School 2024
October 16, 2024
The UP Diliman (UPD) Department of English and Comparative Literature recently organized the 2024 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School (IACS Summer School 2024). Held from Aug. 5 to 16 with the support of the UPD Department of Speech Communication and Theatre Arts, the summer school carried the theme Tense and Tender Tropics: Ecologies of Vulnerability and Care.
Below is a write-up by Kristine Reynaldo, about the summer school.
On the IACS Summer School 2024
Kristine Reynaldo
In his opening lecture for the 2024 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School (IACS Summer School 2024), Chih-ming Wang characterized the event as a “subject-making laboratory” through which “the inter-Asia project is … advanced.” The gist of this project, as Chua Beng Huat reiterated to the summer school participants, was “to bring Asian scholars, Asian writings in Asia to the global audience and into the global archive. The idea, as Chen Kuan-Hsing has said in Asia as Method, is to multiply locations and frames of references within Asia itself, rather than singular reference of Western material.” Such a tide-turning endeavor requires concerted efforts by generations of scholars in building resources and spaces of encounter among intellectuals in Asia.
Participants at the Vargas Museum. Photo from the UPD Department of Speech Communication and Theatre Arts
The IACS Summer School 2024 organized by the UP Diliman (UPD) Department of English and Comparative Literature (DECL) with the support of the UPD Department of Speech Communication and Theatre Arts, brought together 30 local and international scholars and cultural workers and activists to serve as summer school faculty, workshop facilitators, and film screening talkback speakers, and 45 graduate students, researchers, and artists from all around the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. Held from Aug. 5 to 16 in UPD and assembled around the theme Tense and Tender Tropics: Ecologies of Vulnerability and Care, the summer school consisted of lectures, panel discussions, film screenings, workshops, performances, field visits, and small-group discussions.
Through this diverse range of activities, participants explored four interrelated areas of inquiry: (1) Ecocriticism and Critical Island and Empire Studies; (2) Conflict and Violence; (3) Care Work, and; (4) Critical Mediations, focusing on curatorial and artistic practices, productions, and initiatives committed to political story-telling. They inquired into problems faced by many societies in Asia, as these manifest in the Philippine context: inequality and generalized precarity, militarized discourses and state violence, development aggression, imperial and neocolonial politics and economies of extraction (including not only of natural resources, but also digital and academic extractivism), and responses to climate emergency and other planetary conditions of crisis and vulnerability.
Participants during Day 1 of IACS Summer School 2024. Photo from the UPD Department of Speech Communication and Theatre Arts
In advancing discussions on these topics, the summer school…