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.

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.

In advancing discussions on these topics, the summer school highlighted the work of collectives involved in human rights activism and public education and capacity-building, such as DAKILA, RESBAK, and Good Food Community; independent publishers such as Gantala Press, Paper Trail Projects, and Magpies Press, and; university-based cultural institutions such as the Vargas Museum and the Parola Gallery. Bookending sessions that foregrounded cultural practices and productions as critical interventions toward social change were lectures and panel discussions that defined, contextualized, and problematized “Inter-Asia Cultural Studies” as an ethos of committed knowledge production, a social and intellectual movement, a field, framework, and/or method of inquiry, a school of thought, and a community of practice for a constellation of research frameworks, questions, perspectives, approaches, and methods deployed under the banner of “inter-Asian referencing.”

Program highlights included core academic sessions on inter-Asia cultural studies and methodologies, with lectures by Chih-Ming Wang, Chua Beng Huat, and Tejaswini Niranjana, and roundtable discussions with Thiti Jamkajornkeiat, Fran Martin, Madhuja Mukherjee, Judy Ick, Nishant Shah, and Yukari Yoshihara; talks on archipelagic and island poetics and ecocriticism by Elmo Gonzaga, Glenn Diaz, Oscar Campomanes, Christian Benitez, and Timothy Ong; presentations on community-based art practices by Rimi Khan and Conchitina Cruz; talks by Nishant Shah on information overload and analytical frameworks for understanding the digital; a lecture by Maria Carmen Fernandez on practice-based research and engaged scholarship; gallery walk-throughs and curator talks by Tessa Maria Guazon of the Vargas Museum and Lisa Ito-Tapang of Parola; screenings of the documentaries Aswang (2019), Alunsina (2020), and Delikado (2022) about the social costs of the “war on drugs” co-organized with DAKILA – Active Vista; a conversation facilitated by Erika Beldia of RESBAK with women bereaved by the drug war; a roundtable on feminist care work with Faye Cura, Mabi David, and Anna Felicia Sanchez, and; workshops that gave participants opportunities for co-creation, specifically the zine-making activity facilitated by Adam David and Magpies Press, vocal improvisation facilitated by Anjeline de Dios, and the counter-memory and solidarity walk facilitated by Irish Deocampo, Julie Jolo, and Augusto Ledesma.

The IACS Summer School 2024 is the first in-person summer school held by the IACS Society since 2018, and the first event of its kind to be organized and hosted by the DECL. Aside from contributing to intellectual community-building and promoting Inter-Asian cultural studies, the summer school immersed participants in the local contexts and concerns that inform knowledge production in specific sites in the region, connect scholarship with activism, and build discursive infrastructures for conversations and collaborations among participants who are concerned with the ethical role of the arts and humanities in imagining and realizing desired collective futures.

Such work is significant, particularly in light of contemporary movements to “decolonize” disciplines. The humanities and social sciences until now largely look to ideas, thinkers, canons, schools, standards, funding sources, networking platforms, and publication media located in or produced by Anglo-American and European research and higher education institutions and traditions when conducting scholarship. The IACS project, both as an intellectual movement and a regional association of institutions and scholars, proposes that we look to our neighboring countries and thinkers in Asia as reference points for research, pedagogy, and intellectual community, instead of maintaining a kind of dependence on globally dominant knowledge hubs that are located in the West.

Such a project requires resource-building for the creation of more spaces, opportunities, and institutions where intellectuals in Asia can meet and work together to address problems that transcend disciplinary silos and national borders. The IACS Summer Schools affirm that this is not just an academic exercise, but a worthwhile political and pedagogical endeavor, for “Inter-Asia Cultural Studies” denotes not just a set of ideas, canonical texts, institutions, or methodologies, but a dynamic thing, collectively moved by the thinking and doing and interlinking of people who are present to one another.

Acknowledgments

The IACS Summer School 2024 was made possible through the funding support of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society, the UP System Office of International Linkages Supported Constituent Unit Hosting of International Conferences Grant and World Expert Lecture Series Grant, the UPD Office of the Chancellor, the Office of the Dean of the UPD College of Arts and Letters, and the Japan Foundation Arts and Culture Grant.

The full summer school program booklet may be viewed at https://bit.ly/2024IACSbooklet.