De-centering academia: InterAsian Perspectives
By Claudia Derichs, Riho Isaka and Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka
“De-centering academia: InterAsian Perspectives” was a workshop held by the initiative ‘Shaping Asia: Connectivities, Comparisons, Collaborations’ and the German Institute for Japanese Studies on September 13, 2024. It addressed the recent dynamics in higher education in Asia, under the conditions of pronounced power asymmetries, but also of processes of ‘de-centering’—in the sense of challenging the Western dominance in this field. Today’s global landscape of higher education is driven by neo-liberal policies and by the enhanced positional competition between countries, universities, academic staff, and students. The unequal nature of academia is especially observable in the scope of marketization and in different forms of classifying, ranking, and measuring. It is also characterized by cultural asymmetries, for instance by the dominance of the English language in academic expression: English-speaking journals located in the West continue to be most influential in all academic fields; they tend to privilege certain reservoirs of knowledge as well as specific forms of knowledge transmission. At the same time, at least two processes of de-centering take place:
First, in terms of an emergence of new centers of higher education outside of the Western hemisphere and in a reversal of academic migrations – of faculties and students – towards new destinations in Asia. Drawing upon the recent critical assessments of the seemingly durable inequalities in higher education, it is essential to establish what kind of change the perspectival shift to universities outside of the Western region and to new sites of knowledge has already brought about.
Second, in terms of the recent debates on legitimacy and validity of knowledge. Modernity has allotted the center stage to canonized academic knowledge that is strongly influenced by Western positions. Today, more and more actors call for a re-assessment of what is silenced and why certain forms of knowledge have acquired power of definition over long periods of time. Currently, scholars engage in decolonizing dominant academic discourses in a search of ‘alternative’ (Alatas) and ‘discrepant’ (Said) knowledge and in questioning the Western domination of canons in academia (Alatas and Sinha). These processes are observable in the influx of new ideas created in the fields of gender studies and new race theory, and in preoccupations with new avenues in the academic teaching and learning.

The workshop mainly concentrated on the second set of issues. In her opening remarks, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, professor of Socialanthropology at Universität Bielefeld and part of ‘Shaping Asia’’s management team, introduced the ‘Shaping Asia’-program that between the years 2020 and 2024 was mainly funded by the German Research Foundation. ‘Shaping Asia‘ is a networking initiative within the multidisciplinary field of Asian studies. It comprises scholars based at a number of German universities, especially Humboldt University, Berlin, University of Heidelberg, University of Bielefeld, University of Münster, Free University, Berlin, and a growing number of colleagues located at Asian institutions, including The University of Tokyo, National University of Singapore, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, University Ateneo de Manila, and Kathmandu University.
The aim of this initiative is to engender sustained research and activate collaborations between scholars from the humanities and the social sciences who work in different parts of Asia. It stems from the conviction that research on Asian cultures and societies is too compartmentalized, by local or regional focus and by academic disciplines. There is a blatant lack of inter-referencing in the work of scholars working in and on specific regions, and collaborations between different regional study-fields are few. In order to respond to these challenges, the networking initiative ‘Shaping Asia’ is based on three methodological pillars:
(1) tracing connectivities between locales, countries and regions that are usually kept apart in scholarly pre-occupations, despite the manifold interconnections such as the spread of religious or scientific ideas, trading roots, migrations, interstate-agreements, or transnational movements or despite many topics being burning issues in a range of (Asian) societies simultaneously. While it is crucial to uncover and follow the dynamic relations connecting different realms, it is also vital to ask how the connections transform what is being connected.
(2) Engaging in comparative perspectives by inquiring how difference and sameness are put into relation is especially rewarding when acknowledging that comparisons work at least two levels: at the level of processes and actors observed by scholars as well as the level of scholarly preoccupations. Beyond gaining from comparative perspectives, grasping the transformative potentials of comparisons is another gain.
(3) Participating in collaborative endeavors to bring different research fields together and to benefit through exchange of methodologies and conceptualizations deployed in the different disciplinary and regional study fields. Scholarly collaborations are necessarily self-reflexive undertakings in which the modalities and challenges of knowledge co-production need to be (re)considered as it is essential to grasp the power of geo-political positionings and to inquire how they work in our academic every-day life.
Connectivities, comparison and collaborations proved to be a useful and comprehensive lens for analyzing different dimensions of knowledge production and circulation in Asia and beyond, under the conditions of shifting power asymmetries. The workshop “De-centering academia: InterAsian Perspectives” is expected to cast new light on how the post-colonial orders in Asia are overtly and tacitly responded to.
In the opening remarks, Claudia Derichs, professor for Transregional Southeast Asia Studies at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, addressed the synergies between the DIJ’s knowledge lab on “Knowledge Production and Knowledge Infrastructures” and the Shaping Asia initiative’s mission to foster the cross-fertilization of knowledge production on Asia among both European and Asian scholars. In this regard, the workshop formed a vital link between the DIJ knowledge lab and Shaping Asia’s thematic cluster “knowledge circulation”. At the core of both research initiatives is the effort to de-center academia and academic research. Knowledge infrastructures, knowledge generation, knowledge utilization and knowledge circulation are crucial elements in this endeavor. The commitment to achieving a truly collaborative format of knowledge generation requires to reflect not only the demand for epistemic decolonization, but all the more to critically address the implementation of decolonial approaches. What does de-centering and decolonizing mean for scholars around the world who are subjected to a plethora of structural settings, which do not necessarily facilitate the exercise of epistemic decolonization? What do scholars mean by de-centering and decolonizing – and when does it require a reversal of the gaze rather than a deeper look into established fields of study? Moreover, the definition of the very concept of “knowledge”, the appreciation of indigenous, local, non-academic and other forms of knowledge are at stake. Artificial intelligence will also call upon researchers to adjust their means and habits of knowledge generation. The challenges ahead thus invite scholars in Asia and Europe to exchange ideas, to connect, to compare, and collaborate in multiple ways. As Claudia Derichs highlighted, several publications showcase the output in the course of the Shaping Asia network initiative (special journal issues, books, and others) with a focus on the “knowledge circulation” cluster. They can be understood as a fertile ground for proceeding in collaborative work in the future.

In the first key-note titled ‘Negotiating Decolonisation Efforts and Academic Freedom: Resisting Co-optation into the Mainstream” Vineeta Sinha, director of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, argued that the discourse about decolonizing the social sciences has carried the critique of attendant concepts, categories, dichotomies, methodologies and epistemologies in knowledge production efforts. Currently, there seems to be a strong momentum and push for experimenting with decolonizing knowledge production and instituting alternative norms and practices in academia as well as non-academic sites like museums, art galleries, heritage organizations and in the fields of performing and visual arts, dance and drama. In the ongoing efforts to decolonize knowledge production, the first aim is to interrogate and, importantly, argue for re-conceptualizing the taken-for-granted concepts that underpin decolonial movements. She argued that abstract, singular and monolithic ways of thinking about the categories and processes emerging from the notion of the ‘decolonial’ and ‘decolonization’ are limited. Instead, she highlighted the need for multiple, diverse and open-ended modes of crafting decolonizing projects, i.e. to center the principles of diversity/multiplicity and inclusion in conceptions and practice of ‘decolonial’.
In a commitment to academic and intellectual freedom, the second intervention critiques the expectation that all projects should be decolonial. She made a case for resisting a normative stance in the expectation that all academics must necessarily privilege the problematic of decoloniality in their work. The position that all scholars must work within decolonial frames, and viewing this as the exclusive marker of legitimate, meaningful or excellent scholarship runs the risk of rendering decolonization a hegemonic, normative concept. This is further problematic if the latter is formulated in a singular, monolithic and homogenous mode. The turn to this issue highlights the attendant moral and intellectual pressure in some geo-political and academic contexts to focus scholarly debates on decoloniality as the primary/sole endeavor of critical research. She cautioned that concepts – like ‘decolonial’ – and ‘decolonization’ – could themselves become normalized and co-opted by the very institutions and systems of oppression that these aim to critique, thus becoming part of the mainstream knowledge production systems. This would ironically, undermine and attenuate critical, democratizing impulses inherent in calls to decolonization.
In the second key-note titled “De-centering epistemic coloniality at the research-policy interface: migration studies and the migration state” Francis Collins, professor and Head of School, Social Sciences, at the University of Auckland, addressed the challenge of de-centering academic knowledge that necessarily entails a critical engagement with epistemic coloniality, the intellectual structures and systems that sustain knowledge hierarchies and their practical and political effects. This task is not a straightforward one, however, not least because there is a risk of superficial intellectual de-centering that might only involve limited inclusion of alternative epistemologies and greater attention to research contexts outside of Euro-America. De-centering academic knowledge is also challenging because even ‘de-centered’ knowledge production emerges in relation to governmental forces that often manifest the continuance of colonialism, either through their institutionalization and funding or through direct conversation with state practices. He sought to critically reflect on the potential to de-center epistemic coloniality at the research-policy interface. He did so through consideration of migration studies, a research field that more than most is both highly relevant to questions of de-centering and decoloniality, given its attention to nations, borders and mobility, and yet also shaped and arguably constrained by its inherent relation to the migration state.
Despite critical, postcolonial and decolonial interventions, including those emergent from Asian perspectives, the orientation of migration studies towards Euro-American concerns and racially inflected presumptions and politics have arguably become entrenched as the field has expanded massively over the past two decades. In many respects, the strident if often obscured and unacknowledged coloniality of the field is influenced by the orientation towards policy that is almost inherent in a field that presupposes the movement of people across the borders of nation-states. At the research-policy interface agendas can be set, research funding can be aligned to state aspirations, and the capacity for research to influence or challenge policy are established and maintained.
Migration studies thus presents a particularly important case to examine the potentiality and pitfalls of seeking to de-center academic knowledge production and the attendant questions of the necessity of such an agenda, the positionalities of those involved and the ultimate outcomes. In his paper, Francis Collins critically reflects on the decentering of migration knowledge through an account of the institutionalization of the field, and a series of vignettes of working at the edges of the research-policy interface in the settler colonial context of Aotearoa New Zealand. The presentation engaged with the current global questions of decentering academic knowledge in relation to state practice. In doing so, he did not offer a clear-cut approach and solution to decentering epistemic coloniality in migration studies, but rather focused on revealing fraught relationships, frustrations and small openings for disrupting or challenging intellectual and political colonialism.
The first discussant, Noorman Abdullah, National University of Singapore, argued that we can certainly appreciate that decoloniality, as a theoretical framework and a political movement, critiques and seeks to decenter and problematize colonial structures of power and knowledge. Yet at the same time, we are made acutely aware of the issues and problems that can potentially beset even the best of decolonial projects under neoliberal constraints, as Vineeta Sinha has alluded to in her paper via three interventions she has proposed, as well as Francis Collins’ important reminders: Who speaks? Who gets a seat at the table, or in Francis’ terms, ‘access to the rooms’? Who has the authority and authenticity? What happens when a minority or majority speaks?
Taking both of their papers and interventions together as important points of departure and inspiration, he discussed the risks and problematics characterizing decolonial projects and interventions: 1) The risk of idealizing and essentializing decolonial and decentering efforts into a superficial and poorly theorized project; 2) The risk of developing a coherent global project of decolonization; 3) The risk of co-option and tokenism from institutional and power structures along the lines of EDI. Questions directed at both presentations were:
1) The pursuit of academic freedom is indeed an ideal and aspiration and yet: are there limits? Can this aspiration of academic freedom be hegemonic too?
2) Can we really speak of and identify a ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic’ decolonization project in building in the words of Francis Collins’ paper, ‘other worlds’? What does this mean and look like? Who decides? Who adjudicates?
The second discussant Dhruv Raina, Jawaharlal Nehru University, highlighted that both keynote papers engaged with the concerns that animate the world of higher education more or less everywhere, namely that of decolonizing the university. His response arose from his own research concerns with decolonizing the sciences and with the question what this means in terms of conceptualizing indigenous knowledge systems whether capitalized or not. When the question is extended to decolonizing the social sciences the concerns of epistemological violence and epistemic coloniality become more germane. The latter set of concerns are embroiled not just in debates on social theory but as both papers argued with practical issues that elaborate upon the research-policy interface focusing the discussion on specific fields such as migration studies. He alluded to some of the common issues raised, showing the specificities of the cases presented in the Asian context while reflecting upon the commonalities and differences in similar preoccupations in other parts of the world. The issues and concerns about indigenous knowledge systems as a studies show varies across regions and nations. Processes observed in several African countries and in Brazil and Australia appear as quite distinct from the manner in which the problem is articulated in for instance India. Similarly, the meanings associated with decoloniality and the agenda of decolonization varies across regions and nations, former settler colonies and former colonies by conquest.
Tsuyoshi Ishii, University of Tokyo, the third discussant, introduced a novel liberal arts program jointly operated by the University of Tokyo and Peking University as a form of epistemic decolonization in East Asia. This program, called the East Asian Academy for New Liberal Arts (EAA), uses a trilingual setting that encourages students to engage with texts and classroom experiences from unfamiliar perspectives. This approach ultimately helps them develop an understanding of reading diversity and equips them with the skills to navigate unfamiliar circumstances.
In response to Vineeta Sinha’s presentation, Ishii emphasized the importance of critically considering how we can resist the neoliberal and bureaucratic pressures that dominate the current university system, while fully agreeing with her argument. He posed the question to himself and the audience: What kind of university can we envision in this inescapable capitalist world? He suggested that programs like EAA provide a valuable example of alternative practices.
Regarding Francis Collins’ paper, Ishii offered a comparative analysis between Aotearoa New Zealand and Taiwan, two regions with a shared heritage of Polynesian ethnicity, which has been historically suppressed during their modern nation-building processes. Migration today is closely tied to the sovereignty of modern nation-states, and increasing human mobility—driven by various contemporary conditions—should inspire us to decolonize ourselves and work toward creating a better political system. In this context, the Polynesian islands, which have a long history of interconnected pan-Pacific cultures prior to the modern era, have the potential to highlight the need for stronger transnational connections between neighboring countries in Asia and Oceania. Ishii hoped that the self-transformation of both Aotearoa New Zealand and Taiwan would serve as a model for a new civilization that embraces all citizens in a harmonious and open-ended way, due to their unique geopolitical conditions.
About the Authors
Prof. Dr. Claudia Derichs is professor of Transregional Southeast Asia Studies at Humboldt University Berlin.
Prof. Dr. Riho Isaka is professor of South Asian History at University Tokyo.
Prof. Dr. Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka is professor of Social Anthropology at Bielefeld University.
They’re all part of the management team of ‘Shaping Asia’.
Citation: Claudia Derichs, Riho Isaka and Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, De-centering academia: InterAsian Perspectives, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 03.02.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/64183
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (February 3, 2026). De-centering academia: InterAsian Perspectives. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved February 7, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15lxv



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