Written by Isabelle Cockel and Chun-yi Lee.
Image credit: Jewel Lo.
The 20th Annual Conference of the European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS) was held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, on 26th – 28th June 2023. More than 120 participants joined this intellectual festival. A fire drill flushing out all the participants from the SOAS Main Building on the second day added a memorable highlight to the otherwise smooth proceeding of a panel-packed conference. Taiwan Insight featured four conference papers from the 3rd to the 12th of July as part of the celebration. This postface reflected upon the steady growth of Taiwan Studies, as demonstrated by them, in the past twenty years in Europe and beyond.
Collaborated with EATS and taking stock of the wealth of scholarship contributed by EATS conference participants, Taiwan Insight started publishing an annual EATS Conference special issue in 2020. By then, between 2004, when EATS was established at SOAS, and 2019 when Nottingham Trent University hosted the 16th Annual Conference, 692 researchers at all stages of their research careers, including 382 based in Europe and 163 from Taiwan (together they occupied 79 per cent of the total population), presented at EATS conferences.
EATS strongly believes that fostering an environment where globally recognised scholars and master’s degree students present their dissertations on the same stage is a powerful way to enhance Taiwan Studies. This makes it a more vibrant and reflective field and inspires forward-thinking perspectives and sustainable development in the discipline. Guided by the same spirit, EATS combined the 17th conference (lost to the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic) together with the 18th conference held online in 2021 by Masaryk University. Moving on from a hybrid conference held in Cyprus hosted by the University of Central Lancashire in April 2022, last month, EATS returned to SOAS and celebrated its 20th anniversary in its birthplace. By now, nearly 800 papers have been presented by researchers in social sciences and humanities disciplines as well as those interdisciplinary researchers crossing disciplinary boundaries.
How to make such a wealth of fresh scholarship contributed by researchers across continents is a driving force behind the creation of this annual EATS Special Issue. Associated with this altruistic interest is transforming academic endeavours from elitist knowledge production to approachable and time-sensitive knowledge dissemination for informed citizens and general readers. Enjoying a readership of 163,000 readers worldwide, Taiwan Insight is where Taiwan Studies scholars can look up to and make their intellectual enterprises appreciated far and wide online and offline.
Thus, three annual EATS special issues have been published in 2021, 2022 and this year. In their totality, these featured papers, along with those presented at the 20 conferences, ensure that Taiwan Studies actively engages in the debate about the future direction of New Area Studies: a field reflecting both local and global considerations, bottom-up approaches, intersectionality, transnational perspectives, and decolonising tendencies. Looking back, while conference participants persistently scrutinised the evolving Taiwan-China relationship as an integral part of Taiwan’s international relations, this same complex relationship has been examined through a political-economic lens, with a rising interest in uncovering its impact on the expansion of socioeconomic inequality. The deterioration of Hong Kong’s autonomy and liberty has been closely investigated since 2019. With Taiwan considered a consolidated democracy, social movements of all scales, platforms (online, offline), and topics (sexuality, environment, housing, for example) have been examined against the strength of civil society. Pursuing human rights protection for the values of equality and respect has been taken into the private sector, where corporates are called upon to shoulder their responsibility to make the growth sustainable and ensure the workers are healthy and cared for. As interdisciplinary researchers increasingly examine these matters, analysts have embraced discourse analysis to uncover micro, meso, and macro-political dynamics.
For two decades, the exploration of identity has shifted from perceiving it as a tangible entity to be proven by researchers to understanding how it is embodied, represented, or expressed through various art forms like novels, poems, theatre, films, and music. This perspective highlights the dynamic application of intersectionality–considering factors such as gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, age, and ability–to grasp the complexities of human life both within Taiwan and beyond. The in-betweenness of ‘here and there’ or ‘neither here nor there,’ as experienced by migrant spouses, workers or students, is captured by cinema and literature and thus delineated by pop culture researchers. Whilst the challenges encountered by people on the move are recognised by Taiwan Studies researchers, the emotion, belonging, autonomy and sense of ownership of indigenous communities continued to occupy a prominent place on the conference programme year after year. As the study of identity moves away from treating it as an object and leans more towards observing its expression through the islanders’ actions, new research areas emerge in Taiwan Studies. Specifically, cultural policy and heritage conservation have become key fields for researchers to explore and understand how the islanders commit to narrating, recalling, or reconstructing their occasionally conflicting memories.
We are in debt to the intellectual enterprise of researchers who present their findings at conferences held in 17 European cities at 18 universities or research institutions. In their collective endeavour, ‘cutting-edge research’ ceases to be a snappy catchy phrase but a reality. Making their findings approachable and accessible via this online platform is our way to pay back their contributions.
Looking ahead, we hope to see more varieties of conference presentations in future EATS conferences, and we hope that Taiwan Insight will be able to be the continuous online platform to feature those different discussions/presentations through EATS about Taiwan. Furthermore, we hope more academic discussions and presentations can be linked up through EATS annual conferences, the exciting exchanges through each presentation panel, conference activities and tea/coffee breaks, and then be presented on the borderless and timeless online community, Taiwan Insight.
Isabelle Cockel is a Senior Lecturer in East Asian and International Development Studies at the University of Portsmouth. She is currently the Secretary-General of the European Association of Taiwan Studies (2018-2025).
Chun-yi Lee is an Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham School of Politics and International Relations. She is the Director of the Taiwan Studies Program at the University of Nottingham and the Editor-in-Chief of Taiwan Insight.
This article was published as part of a special issue on European Association of Taiwan Studies.
