New York Center for Global Asia
Port City Workshop
24-25 May, 2019
King Juan Carlos Center (53 Washington Square South), room 701

Link to presentation materials

This Port City Workshop is an effort to foster collaborative conversations about the study of port city urbanism in spaces of mobility that comprise Global Asia, from ancient times to the present. Coming at the end of the first year of our three-year project on Port City Environments, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, this meeting will inform transitions to the next phase, when we plan to generate collaborative project outcomes, online and in print.

In our weekly Colloquium meetings, we have seen how individual ports acquired ecological, physical, social, cultural, aesthetic, technological, culinary, political, and other characteristics. Spatial and temporal comparisons could perhaps form a basis for combining work on individual ports. How might ports inflect urbanism differently in different times and locations? Might distinctive coastal urban forms typify the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Black Sea, Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal, Malacca Straits, South China Sea, and Sea of Japan? How might modern industrial port cities differ from earlier forms? Exploring these and many other questions may promote collaborative work across a range of cases and disciplines.

Our first and most important job is to learn from one another. Toward that end, we have created a resource page that lists all participants with links to some of their relevant online information. We also have a GoogleDoc folder, where each participant has a sub-folder in which to upload the following material.

(1) A short (max 1,000 words) text to present central issues, arguments, and questions in their own research and to clarify how their work contributes to understanding of port city environments. These texts are labelled as “[lastname] Workshop Text.” Reading all Workshop Texts before the meeting will form the basis for workshop discussions.

(2) Any other texts to elucidate your work and its contribution. Please refer to those texts in your “Workshop Text” with parenthetical citations (like this).

(3) PowerPoint or other slides to use during a ten minute workshop presentation.

The workshop itself will consist of short (ten minute) presentations, discussions, and lots of time for informal conversations. The original effort to divide participants into separate groups focused respectively on building and on inhabiting port cities did not match descriptions in Workshop Texts provided by participants.

On Saturday, May 25, we will meet in the morning for general discussion and for considering possible next steps. One possibility is that some of us might collaborate to produce an issue of one of our journals; another is that we could put our work together our own web platform. That second option raises the possibility of joining together do utilize digital technologies that provide ways to combine and present our research publicly. With that in mind, Centers for Global Asia in New York, Shanghai, and Abu Dhabi are organizing a series of workshops in Digital Humanities specifically to enrich ongoing Global Asia research and to build useful online research, archival, and teaching resources. On Saturday, we can discuss relevant digital needs, interests, and technical options, to help us design suitable Digital Workshop workshops for our own purposes.

Schedule Outline

Friday May 24, 2019

8:30- 9:00 Coffee and bagels

9:00-9:25 Introductions

9:30 – 9:40 John Burt
9:45 – 9:55 Chandana Anusha
10:00 – 10:10 Debjani Bhattacharya
10:15 – 10:25 Jerome Whitington
10:30 – 10:40 Prita Meier
10:45 – 10:55 Devika Shankar
11:00 – 11:10 Vidhya Raveedranathan
11:15 – 11:25 Yifei Li

11:25 – 11:45 Break
11:45 – 12:30 Discussion

12:30-1:30 Lunch with presentation of Digital Project possibilities

1:30 – 1:40 Ayesha Omer
1:45 – 1:55 Elke Papelitzky
2:00 – 2:10 David Ludden
2:15 – 2:25 Heather Lee
2:30 – 2:40 Mary Killilea

2:45 – 3:15 Discussion
3:15- 3:30 Break

3:30 – 3:40 Krishnendu Ray
3:45 – 3:55 May Joseph
4:00 – 4:10 Neelima Jeychandran
4:15 – 4:25 Nidhi Mahajan
4:30 – 4:45 Norman Underwood
4:50 – 5:00 Peter Valenti
5:05 – 5:15 Yijun Wang
5:20 – 5:30 Zvi Ben Dor

5:30 – 6:00 Discussion
6:00 – 9:00 Reception and Dinner at Torch Club 18 Waverly Place, New York, NY 10003

Saturday May 25, 2019

If desired: KJCC 701: 10:00-1:00 Next Steps