Cultural Creativity and Research in Asia and the Pacific

This course has two goals: first, to explore the importance of creative practices as ways of knowing in Asian and Pacific cultures, and second, to advance creative practices as part of innovative research on Asia and the Pacific. We will look closely at diverse cultural forms, which may include performance traditions, rituals, oral stories, print culture, and/or visual and digital media, to investigate how they work as modes of historical knowledge, cultural critique, and political reflection. In dialogue with these forms, we will consider how your own academic research might expand beyond traditional scholarly boundaries by working more intimately with creative expression. Experimenting with forms that may include ethnography, life writing, embodied practice, fiction, visual art, and/or multimedia, we will consider how different ways of representing place, person, voice, the self, history, and the integration of creative practice and critical theory can lead to new and expanded ways of engaging with Asian and Pacific societies.