The InterAsia Initiative

The ACSS is a contributing partner of the InterAsia Initiative. The initiative, launched in 2008 at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), seeks to promote frameworks and concepts for a new generation of scholarship that reconceptualizes Asia as a dynamic and interconnected formation spanning Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East (including Turkey), and Russia. Other initiative partners include the National University of Singapore, the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong, Yale University and Goettingen University (Germany). Based on an MOU with the partners, the ACSS participates in the planning meetings of the steering committee, hosts meetings of the initiative in the region, and particularly works to facilitate and fund the participation of Arab region scholars in the various activities and conferences of the initiative. 

Among the main InterAsia activities that the ACSS contributes to is the Transregional Virtual Research Institute, or TVRI, a collaborative enterprise that brings together faculty from different disciplines, different international campuses, and at different stages in their careers to further research and training on a particular theme. The inaugural TVRI, Media Activism and the New Political, focuses on the interrelationship of media and politics within and across InterAsia, with a particular emphasis on China, India and the Arab world. The first planning meeting of the TVRI was hosted by the ACSS in Beirut. Highlights of the TVRI include: “Istanbul Conversations: The New Global Left and the Politics of Mediated Activism,” a public forum held in conjunction with the October 2014 international conference Inter-Asian Connections IV that brought together a group of distinguished media activists and academics to discuss how new cultures and forms of media technique and agency across Asia and the MENA region have created alternative and engaged media uses, facilitating critical, public engagements with contemporary socio-economic and political issues, as well as funded research, including scholarly essays and resources, focused on media empires, the symbolic dimensions of and spaces and genealogies of media activism across the Arab region.