Lake and Mountains in East Asia
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Global Research Workshops

The Stanford Global Studies Division (SGS) provides grants for Global Research Workshops to support the sharing of research across fields and national boundaries that advances our understanding of the world. These grants are made possible by the generous support of Chelsea and Scott Kohler.

2024-25 Global Research Workshop recipients:

New Civilizationisms
Lead organizer: Haiyan Lee

Over the past two decades, authoritarian populist governments have come to power in many different regions of the world. This period has also seen the resurgence of civilizational discourses that define the people in terms of their unique civilizational identity and call for states to refurbish their timeless civilizational glory. The "New Civilizationisms Research Network" comprises two dozen or so scholars located in institutions of higher education in North America, Europe, and Asia and spanning a range of humanities and social science disciplines. Together we investigate how the trope of civilization mainstreams, normalizes, and obfuscates the authoritarian and ethno-majoritarian commitments of contemporary strongman regimes. Through this workshop series, we will bring our members to Stanford – in person or virtually – for a series of conversations that combine research presentations and reports from the field. 


Developing an Interdisciplinary Research Platform Toward "Next Asia"
Lead organizer: Gi-Wook Shin

This workshop series, organized by members of Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL), brings together scholars and initiatives dedicated to addressing pressing social, cultural, economic, and political challenges in Asia through a cross-disciplinary and transnational comparative approach. With Asia assuming a central role in the global economy and cultural landscape, understanding and addressing its complexities are paramount for shaping future global developments. This series is committed to presenting evidence-based policy recommendations grounded in the lab’s interdisciplinary research. By fostering collaboration with academic and policy research institutions across Asia, the series aims to generate comprehensive insights into the region's issues and propose structural reforms that pave the way for a more mature and innovative “Next Asia.” Key areas of focus include evaluating global talent development strategies in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond, exploring the intersection of racism and nationalism and its impact on exclusion and intolerance, assessing U.S.-Asia relations, and examining the global decline of democratic governance. Providing an interdisciplinary platform for rigorous analysis and dialogue, the workshops aim to identify challenges and opportunities for fostering inclusive growth, tackling inequality, addressing geopolitical hazards, and strengthening democratic institutions. By promoting network-based collaboration, the series seeks to contribute to innovative interdisciplinary research, policy development and implementation, ultimately shaping a more dynamic and resilient global system in the 21st century.


Global Approaches to Multilingual Data Practices and Digital Humanities
Lead organizer: Giovanna Ceserani

This workshop aims to bridge gaps between digital humanities scholars and data practitioners across linguistic and cultural boundaries. By fostering a global dialogue, the workshop will explore innovative methodologies, tools, and practices for managing, analyzing, and interpreting digital data in multiple languages. Participants will engage in collaborative sessions, hands-on training, and discussions, emerging with enhanced skills, broader perspectives, and a network of colleagues committed to advancing multilingual digital humanities. We include data, cultural objects, and projects that include multiple languages and/or scripts or are non-English within their origination in our definition of "multilingual". The primary goal of this workshop is to create a collaborative, inclusive space where participants from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds can share knowledge, strategies, and innovations in the field of digital humanities.


Imperial Environments
Lead organizer: Zephyr Frank

This workshop builds on the growing momentum of environmental humanities at Stanford in order to explore imperialism as an ecological phenomenon. Taking a trans-imperial and transnational approach, we ask how global empires imagined and represented nature in different colonial contexts, how newly constructed commodity frontiers reshaped the relationships between peoples and environments around the world, and how clashes between different systems of ecological knowledge played out during the imperial encounter. This workshop series will draw on methods from history, English, anthropology, postcolonial studies, STS, and environmental studies in order to examine the imperial legacies that continue to shape our planetary crisis and approaches to environmental governance on a global scale.


French Speaking Worlds: Then & Now
Lead organizer: Fatoumata Seck

This speaker series will examine the histories, literatures, and cultures of the various French-speaking worlds that have developed from the 16th century to the 21st century. The French language is spoken across five continents and three oceans, with approximately 300 million people speaking it as either a first or second language worldwide. It is the official language of many countries in Africa, the Caribbean and Europe and is widely spoken and taught as a second language in Asia, North and South America, and Oceania. In choosing the name “French-Speaking Worlds: Then and Now,” this research workshop aims to signal the intellectual stakes of re-conceptualizing French Studies as “French-Speaking World(s).” Due to the implied notion of a separation between French individuals and those who are considered “Francophone,” it is a critical gesture to challenge both the French-centered “French Studies” and the terms “Francophonie” and “Francophone,” (to refer mainly to France’s ex-colonies or to writers from these countries who write in French). These discussions will focus on themes that are central to the making of the French-Speaking World such as revolution, colonialism, decolonization, material culture, the literary marketplace, the circulation of knowledge, political philosophy, and globalization. Our speakers will use specific case studies from French-speaking regions to explore the intricate ways in which historical processes, race, class, gender, sexuality, and social practices intersect and influence the ideas and practices that shape our society and the world we live in.


Law & Literature in the Global South
Lead organizers: Hector Hoyos and Joe Wager

We open spaces for discussion of Law and Literature in the Global South. Building off our successful events from previous academic years, we will continue expanding the Law and Humanities critical paradigm, understanding each term of this pair capaciously. Our workshop has consistently engaged with works from and in the South as a spatial and temporal category and site of theory production. In this way, we oppose the de facto affirmation of the hegemony of U.S.-European academic milieus, working with and beyond conversations of legal and cultural practices in/from the Global North. This workshop series focuses on practitioners whose work speaks to global concerns and sparks innovative discussions, as evinced by our previous sessions. 


Global Approaches to Sacred Spaces
Lead organizer: Bissera Pentcheva

This series shines a spotlight on the diverse instantiations of sacred space across time and geographies and addresses its many-layered contestations. In the past, sacred spaces were regarded as an insulated place of the metaphysical. A renewed engagement with the concept reveals that these are sites of cultural production having immediate effects on the outside world and politics. Sacred Spaces and their constituent factors are active in producing identity, memory, sensual experience, and knowledge that tie together the spiritual with the social. Sacred spaces can encompass theories of post-humanisms, especially in culturally related landscapes, topographies, and cosmologies that initiate the sacred from outside of the anthropocentric. World heritage programs, conservation, and political negotiations factor in the life of sacred sites, challenging us to consider both the material shells and the intangible aspects of cultural production. In some extreme cases, sacred spaces have completely transformed through desacralization, desecration, and resacralization. Time tends to adhere to them, enabling a long durée of ancient, medieval, colonial, modern, and post-colonial. The study of sacred spaces demands global and interdisciplinary approaches. Transformative methodologies and practices, both traditional and innovative, include archaeology, archaeoacoustics, archeoastronomy, architecture, art history, artists and practitioners, music, anthropology, cult and community, digital and film media, design, engineering, geography, history, literature, poetry, sociology, and cultural heritage and human rights.