Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Category: De-Centering Academia: InterAsian Perspectives

Taking the workshop “De-centering academia: InterAsian Perspectives,” held at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) in Tokyo, as its starting point, this blog series investigates recent transformations in higher education across Asia. It examines how processes of de-centering challenge enduring Western dominance in academic knowledge production and institutional hierarchies. The contributions engage with questions of epistemic asymmetry, marketization, language hegemony, and transregional mobility of scholars and students. Special emphasis is placed on emerging centers of academic authority in Asia, the reversal of global academic flows, and critical reflections on canonized knowledge. The series features insights from the Shaping Asia network and the Knowledge Lab at DIJ, bringing together comparative and collaborative perspectives from Japan, Germany, and beyond. A more detailed description of this conference is available here.
This series is edited by Harald Kümmerle, DIJ Tokyo.

A colorful abstract mural featuring lines of green, pink, and blue that draw the eye toward a central focal point.

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 Japan Institute 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.