Co-creating a Chimera: Reflections from the 2025 Penn State Global Asias Summer Institute

By Pattajit Tangsinmunkong, University of Tokyo

The 2025 Summer Institute on Global Asias, hosted by Tina Chen and Charlotte Eubanks at Penn State University, offered a rare and generative space for deep reflection, collaboration, and conceptual experimentation. Over one week, twenty-three scholars from different disciplines and institutional settings gathered to ask what “Global Asias” has been—and what it might become at an institutional level.

Our discussions began with the institutional. How can we make the best use of the resources we have, and build a meaningful and sustainable platform for Global Asian Studies from within Asia—particularly at the University of Tokyo? Together with Jiyoon Kim, we presented our proposal for GAS 2.0: a vision of moving beyond ad hoc activities toward a more intentional, interdisciplinary platform, and ultimately, a community.

This proposal emphasized not only individual research but also the building of infrastructure and community that can support students, connect publics, and reshape narratives about Asia. For us, Global Asias is not only about producing scholarship but also about creating conditions for a scholarly community that can outlast individual projects. This report summarizes key takeaways from my participation.

Chimera as Method: co-creating Global Asias

The call for applications began with the sentence: “We see Global Asias as an invitation to build things differently.” This line struck me, and during the workshop I came to understand it more fully. We were invited to imagine our Global Asia initiatives—and our academic labor in teaching, research, and service—not as separate boxes but as something hybrid, even alien.

One of the most memorable collective activities was the Chimera Workshop. On the last day, we were asked to design our Global Asias as a chimera, a hybrid creature. The heart represented our core values, the front legs our intended products, the back legs our hidden labor, and the tail the legacy we want to leave. The creature could take any form and could have as many hearts, legs, or tails as we imagined.

This exercise revealed that what appear to be limitations are often products of our own perception and categorization. We tend to divide the internal reality into strengths and weaknesses, and the external reality into opportunities and threats. Trained to think in terms of what we lack rather than what we have, we privilege realism and strategy over imagination. Our gaze naturally gravitates toward limitations, weaknesses, and threats. The Chimera exercise, by contrast, invited us to reappreciate our resources and to see the so-called have-nots not as deficits but as challenges—opportunities to transform fragments into a new, generative form.

Applying this metaphor personally shifted how I view our GAS initiative and also my academic career. Instead of treating “teaching,” “research,” and “service” as separate, bureaucratic checkboxes, I began to see them as parts of a creative assemblage—my personal chimera. It reminded me that limitations can be deceptive; they are often rooted in the ways we have been trained to think about academic work. Tradition is not necessarily the enemy of innovation, nor is individuality opposed to the institution. With imagination, our personal values and passions can coexist with, and even reshape, long-standing academic norms. Tradition and individuality, institution and creativity, need not be opposites.

One Theme, Many Meanings and Approaches

Borders are often framed as barriers, but they can also be productive and generative. The Summer Institute addressed the tensions in the U.S. academic landscape, where Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, and Diaspora Studies overlap in subject matter but have historically stood in antagonistic relation to one another. In this space, “Global Asias” are presented as a critical site of interdisciplinary and trans-field collaboration—one that seeks commonality while holding on to differences, and that treats friction as intentional and productive.

A concrete example of this was our discussion of the special issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias titled Toward an Archipelagic Praxis and Method. The term “archipelago” became a shared theme, but it was interpreted and reimagined differently by each contributor. Thiti Jamkajornkeiat’s “archipelago of solidarity” connected platform worker strikes across Southeast Asia as a shared struggle against global capitalism. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi’s “archipelagos of refugee solidarity” reframed refugee camps and detention islands as linked sites of displacement and resistance. Sarah Ihmoud’s “archipe-logics of shataat” analyzed settler colonial practices in Palestine as producing “island formations without water[1].” These diverse cases showed how one concept can be stretched and reinterpreted across disciplines and regions. For our own GAS 2.0 initiative at the University of Tokyo, “archipelago” offers a powerful metaphor. This approach shows the possibility of how individual researchers can work on their subjects within their disciplines in a shared space.

Global Asia as an Unfinished Project

This Summer Institute reminded me that Global Asias is not a fixed object or destination. It is not a place, nor a coherent field, but a way of doing—a mode of co-creating knowledge and building meaningful relationships across uneven terrains. During this one week, rather than simply networking, the Summer Institute encouraged us to ask what it means to build meaningful relationships. What counts as meaningful for us as individuals and as an institute? This project will always remain unfinished—an evolving community in which participants can continually redefine what is meaningful. That is the spirit of GAS 2.0, the community we aspire to build.

 

Reimagining Global Asian Studies through Cross-Pollination

By Jiyoon Kim, University of Tokyo

This summery week at the 2025 Summer Institute at Penn State University on “Global Asias: Institutional Form/Alien Form” was a highly impactful experience. Throughout the workshop, I encountered a range of new ideas, methods, and scholarly practices, which provided numerous reflections and open-ended questions not only on Global Asian Studies but also on intellectual engagements, both institutionally and individually, on how we arrive and what we are willing to do. The institute was not simply a site for inter-institutional exchange on Global Asias—it was a space for reimagining the very structures and infrastructures through which such exchanges and collaborations occur.

From the outset in 2014, the Global Asias Summer Institute is designed to mentor and support early-career scholars, with a different theme each year to encourage multidisciplinary and cross-field intellectual interactions.[2]Additionally, this year’s summer institute “The Institutional Forms of Global Asias” was an evolved version inviting seven teams, not individual early career scholars, with various institutional settings and goals, including graduate student activist groups, overseas student networks, faculty members from a teaching college, cross-disciplinary working groups, multidisciplinary Asian Studies programs in their early stage, and research institute like ourselves.

The very participatory program consisted of multiple home team works, alien team works, skill shares/institutional hacks, and group discussions. Conceptual inventories such as relational nonalignment, structural dissonance, generic friction, and critical consolidation were employed to reflect existing institutional forms of academic outputs, each institutional form, and TRS (teaching, research, service) activities in general, and then to envision alternative infrastructures and scholarly practices.[3] The workshop made clear that “institutional forms” are not inert or given frameworks; instead, they evolve and are transformative in co-creative and innovative ways, as well as in cross-pollinating, inclusive, and caring manners.

Its commitment to disruption and creative praxis is not anarchic for its own sake, but rather generative, creating openings for new kinds of scholarly engagement and community-building. The summer institute encouraged me to envision alternative models and further endeavors for developing programs and collaborations that do not merely replicate existing power structures and intellectual conventions. It also inspired me to think differently about conventional scholarly genres—research essays, monographs, edited volumes, academic events—asking how they might be reimagined and performed through “alien forms” as innovative infrastructures from co-creative, multi-perspectival, affective approaches.

In this way, the workshop offered not only theoretical and methodological insights but also practical visions for reimagining intellectual practices and collaborations. Collaboration was not treated as an optional supplement to individual research, but as a primary mode of knowledge production. This spirit of co-creative work and a sense of community, grounded in mutual respect and curiosity, was a refreshing alternative to the competitive and individualized ethos that so often dominates academic spaces. This ethos of Global Asias, I believe, also resonates deeply with Global Asian Studies (GAS) Initiative at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo.

And then there was the ice cream. One afternoon, between sessions dense with ideas about institutional critique and transformation, we shared bowls of homemade Penn State ice cream—made from the milk of cows raised on the university’s own farms. The flavors were inventive, drawn from local ingredients, and somehow managed to embody the workshop’s spirit: rooted in a specific place, attentive to process, and unapologetically creative, also reminding me of Hokkaido University. That moment of shared sweetness was, in its own way, an institutional intervention—reminding us that community can be built not only through argument and theory, but also through the simple act of enjoying something fun together. Ice cream is just one example, but with the warmest hospitality every day for one week, we could fully indulge in the very intense schedule in a friendly, supportive, encouraging, and empowering atmosphere.

I left the Summer Institute with a renewed sense of purpose. The work of challenging conventions and pursuing pioneering practices can be daunting, but the workshop affirmed that it is possible—and that there is joy to be found along the way. By embracing Global Asias’ disruptive energies and encouraging ethos, I see more clearly now how to contribute to GAS initiative at Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo, working both within and across it, and how to inhabit academia strategically and collaboratively, to imagine and make real something better forward.

 

[1] De Leon, Adrian, Thiti Jamkaajornkeeiaat, Evyn Llê Esppirituu Gagandhi, Sarah Ihmoud, and Tiara R. Na’puti. “Toward an Archipelagic Praxis and Method: Solidarity, Storytelling, and Decolonization across Global Asias.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 10, no. 2 (2024): 2–42. https://doi.org/10.1353/vrg.2024.a934653.

[2] For further information on Global Asias Summer Institute and previous themes, see https://sites.psu.edu/vergeglobalasias/summer-institute/

[3] For these conceptual frameworks, see also: Chen, Tina, and Charlotte Eubanks, eds. Global Asias: Tactics & Theories. University of Hawai’i Press, 2025. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.14203764.