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ADI forskning

ADI har lanceret fire nye forskningsprojekter. Nærmere bestemt er der tale om fire paraplyer for forsknings- og undervisningsaktiviteter på tværs af faggrænser.

De fire paraplyer er:

Urban imaginaries and power in Asian mega-cities

Many of the larger urban regions in Asia are meta-regions that represent considerable agglomeration of political, financial, human, and physical resources in a location that often covers more than one jurisdictional unit. They are spaces for the integration and negotiation of the global, the regional and the local and their development, their visions for the future, their identity and the reconfiguration and use of their spaces are negotiated between the locals and the newcomers, between the authorities and the citizens, between the self and the other. These mega-cities are dynamos of regional, national and global growth, development, and socio-economic change, producing poor and rich, winners and losers, and thriving on the constant contestations and negotiation of their realities, their placeness, their identity, and the imaginaries that drive them forward.

Asian mega-cities are laboratories for urban thinking and development that may help us understand new dynamics of developments in Asia with a global significance.

Contact: Jørgen Delman, Professor, Chinese Studies 

Asia-Europe Encounters

In this theme, we turn our attention to moments of encounter - historical and current - between Asia and Europe that have been crucial in shaping the very histories and identities of these places. As we trace the genealogy of these encounters, we simultaneously seek to historically locate as well as isolate the difference in the current preoccupation of Europe with Asia. We approach Asia and Europe not as distinct territorial entities that can be visibly and materially separated and contrasted with each other, rather we place them discursively as ideas with specific histories that have been critical to the formation of popular imaginations, inimical and intimate relationships, and fears and desires of the other. The theme is set in a wide temporal and spatial sweep - across centuries and nations - to understand the ways in which Europe is once again approaching the shores of Asia. This includes discussions as far ranging as outsourcing, employment, productivity to that of restructuring of political institutions, cultural atavism, and identity making in Asia and Europe.

Contact: Ravinder Kaur, Associate Professor, South Asian Studies and Ayo Wahlberg, Postdoctoral Fellow, Anthropology

Bodies and Boundaries

The topic is conceived broadly and explicitly across the disciplines and without a priori theoretical shackles.
"Bodies and Boundaries" explores the multiplicity of meanings constructed around political borders as well as the invisible but nevertheless very real boundaries which divide groups of people according to historically contingent categories: gender, race, class, age, profession etc. It moreover has relevance for the problematization of unquestioned spatial imaginings of distinct geo-cultural entities (for instance Europe and Asia) and questions these "bodies" of knowledge.

Bodies and boundaries are predicated on each other. Physical bodies as "the inscribed surface of events" (Foucault) are literally defined by and situated around, across and between arbitrarily drawn boundaries. Individuals and groups demarcate and embody the regimes of knowledge (bodies of information) of ostensibly culturally articulated entities. The investigation of how boundaries are incorporated into bodies and bodies delimited by boundaries can link such apparently diverse phenomena as migration, medicine, sport and schooling, deviance and death, consumption, fashion, literary and artistic tropes and even urban construction and demolition.

Contact: Denise Gimpel, Associate Professor, Chinese Studies and Ildikó Bellér-Hann, Associate Professor, Central Asian Studies

State, Society and Marginality in Asia

The modern liberal state, premised as it is on individual rights, has always struggled to find adequate responses to group claims articulated by the political process, premised on a variety of socio-cultural thematic. Without revisiting the myth of ethnocultural neutrality of the state, most modern states have adopted a variety of ad hoc policy measures - from constitutionally mandated socio-cultural rights, through policies of diversity, multiculturalism and policies of assimilation; and the entire spectrum in between. This theme invites for research in the processes of economic marginalisation, inclusion and these processes' interconnectedness with cultural mobilisation. At a theoretical level it will form a much needed addition to communitarian social theory by including the state and its importance in peoples' mobilisation.

Contact: Peter B. Andersen, Associate Professor, Sociology of Religion