Relocating without Reorienting? the Geopolitics of Knowledge Production In Area Studies

The geography of knowledge production in area studies has changed. Research centres across Asia now produce scholarship that Euro-American institutions once supplied. That geographic shift is real. The epistemic shift may not have followed. Scholars based in Asian institutions may still treat Western work as their comparative anchor, their source of legitimation, and their main benchmark of significance. This session asks whether the shift in where knowledge is made has altered the reference points through which it is produced, evaluated, and legitimised. It locates the answer in institutional mechanisms. Journal rankings, citation norms, grant frameworks, accreditation systems, and hiring criteria can reward conformity to Euro-American standards regardless of where scholars sit. The answer determines whether a more plural field is emerging or whether old hierarchies persist under new geography.

The session invites empirical papers that test, rather than assume, the link between geographic and epistemic change. We welcome case studies of knowledge centres in Southeast Asia and beyond, and comparisons across local, established, and emerging centres. Useful evidence includes publication strategies, citation practices, comparative frameworks, and legitimacy claims. Papers may engage Chen Kuan-Hsing's Asia as method, Bourdieusian field theory, or other approaches to the sociology of knowledge. Together they will show how scholarly fields reproduce or unsettle epistemic dependence, and what a genuinely reoriented social science would require.