Doing Area Studies in the Polycentric Condition – CrossArea 2023 Conference and DIMAS Kick-Off Event

The Department for Interdisciplinary and Multiscalar Area Studies (DIMAS) at the University of Regensburg (UR) together with the Leibniz ScienceCampus Europe and America in the Modern World, a joint project of the UR and Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) are delighted to invite you to the 2023 CrossArea conference in Regensburg.

Titled Doing Area Studies in the Polycentric Condition, the conference will take place on 16–17 November at the Altes Finanzamt, Landshuter Str. 4, 93047 Regensburg. As well as constituting the annual CrossArea e.V. conference, the event will also serve as the kick off event for DIMAS, an area studies initiative in Regensburg that was formally launched in 2022.

The conference will see members of DIMAS and associated projects outline their ongoing research, showing how cross-disciplinary and cross-regional collaboration can further knowledge production. The value of apparently “small” disciplines is emphasized in particular in Regensburg.

The keynote talk by the journalist and author Vincent Bevins will discuss the emergence of protest movements in the Global South during the 2010s and their mixed results in attempting to advance “leaderless" revolutions in the face authoritarian and populist challengers.

On the second day, early career researchers will present their work that engages with some of the key challenges facing the world, including the climate crisis; decolonization; migration and integration demographic shifts;  and ensuring greater political agency for regions beyond the prevalent global powers. Further panels will explore how digitization and the reconfiguration of disciplines are changing area studies methodologies; as well as the future of archives and knowledge infrastructures for several regional studies fields in a panel coordinated by the NFDI4Memory consortium.

The conference is accompanied by a photography exhibition by the artist and ethnographer Barbara Wimmer-Bulin. In São Teotónio Never Sleeps, she examines the interactions of globality and locality, as well as the environment, industry, tourism and migration, at the edge of Europe—Portugal—to address central questions of our age.