This study explores and understands transnational activism in Asia, specifically focusing on the crucial role played by individuals, particularly Thai youth activist Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, in shaping and constructing transnational networks and relations. The study argues that the networks individuals establish with other transnational actors serve as the primary source of inspiration for other individuals to engage in transnational activism. These networks are rooted in everyday life interactions in the era of globalisation, with activism reflecting this embeddedness and interconnectedness. The case study of Netiwit demonstrates how connections between Thai activists and activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan stem from the increased mobility of individuals in the globalised world, facilitating physical interactions. By analysing this dynamic, the study aims to offer a more nuanced explanation of transnational activism, the movement of knowledge, and the concept of globalisation in Asia.

This paper presents the content of this thematic issue of Diogenes on Asian studies in Turkey. It explains the origins of this set of papers in light of relevant scholarship, relates it to current academic work in the field, and provides a rationale for issuing a volume on Asian scholarship in Turkey.

Regional studies in Turkey have long focused on Europe and the Middle East, with which Turkey has traditionally been associated. East Asian studies seem to remain out of the spotlight. This study claims firstly that different phases of Asian studies scholarship in Turkey have all been geared towards confirmation and validation of the process of Turkish national identity formation. Secondly, this process also reflects the Western-centrism of Turkish academic knowledge production.

This paper presents a periodization of Asian Studies in Turkey in three phases to contextualize and demonstrate these claims. During the first phase of the early republican years, the first Sinology departments were expected to actively contribute to writing Turkish national history. Throughout the second phase of the Cold War years, Turkey found itself in both political and intellectual isolation. In the final phase of post-Cold War globalization, the scope of regional studies scholarship expanded to include East Asia. Despite this development, academic scholarship in Turkey still suffers from Western-centrism and it is not able to directly communicate with East Asia. Knowledge production on East Asia in Turkey is still filtered through the theoretical framework of the Western Anglophone academic world.

This paper discusses a rare Late Ming blue and white porcelain bowl with five cartouches depicting scenes of sexual intercourse, which was found during archaeological excavations in the Santana convent, a former Franciscan nunnery located in Lisbon founded in 1562. The paper begins with a description of the bowl, the context of its recovery and its significance, highlighting its extreme rarity among Chinese export porcelains. The second section discusses Chinese sexuality and the production of erotica during the Late Ming period, namely porcelains with erotic and sexual imagery, a subject that has been overlooked by mainstream scholarship. The last section proposes an explanation for the presence of this bowl in the Santana nunnery, emphasising the gap between the ideals of Iberian Catholic monastic life and the worldly practices conducted by the members of these religious orders in the Baroque era.

This essay draws on the philosophy, principles, and practices animating Global Asias scholarship to consider how this conceptual rubric shifts the ways in which we approach the subjects, objects, methods, and praxes of the academic study of Asia. Structurally dissonant as an epistemological project, Global Asias encourages scholars to acknowledge the institutional designs and disciplinary practices that currently organize and make legible work on Asia and its diasporas while simultaneously highlighting the limits of, and points of noncontact between, the broader infrastructures (including area studies, ethnic studies, diaspora studies, and the disciplines and interdisciplines) under which such work has traditionally been organized. In addition to offering a conceptual topography of Global Asias, this essay proposes three praxis-oriented concepts—relational nonalignment, structural dissonance, and imaginable ageography—that enable Global Asias as a tactical and evolving approach to the study of Asia and its multiple diasporas, one which actively resists the drive toward “critical consolidation” that often results from academic paradigm work.

Undeniably, one of the rare characteristics of James C. Scott's scholarship is that his analytical insights are widely recognized in many fields beyond political science and Asian studies. Scott's contributions to the vast literatures of agrarian and environmental studies, the theory of hegemony and resistance, development studies, postcolonial studies, state formation, and anarchism, to name just a few, are recognized by scholars of diverse disciplines as new standards that challenge widely accepted assumptions and theories and reveal underappreciated aspects and untold narratives of social history—particularly for those who, under normal conditions, do not raise their voice and did not have letters to leave records.

As anyone who has written a book can tell you, when you finally finish wrestling with it and it is confined between covers, or tucked away in e-book form, it goes on to have an afterlife, sometimes quite a complicated one, which the author may glimpse only in intermittent and fragmentary form. An original and provocative book such as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble will travel to places its author never anticipated and become embroiled in conversations the author may not overhear. A book's influence on another field far from its point of origin is not best assessed by a citation index—though Gender Trouble's numbers are massive. To take the measure of the work that Gender Trouble has done for scholars working in Asian studies (itself a constructed and constantly morphing category, like gender), we should ask how the book traveled. Which pieces were taken up by scholars of Asia, and what conversations and challenges did the book enable, not as a blueprint but as an incubator of locally grounded thinking? How has it been adapted, pruned down to one or two insights, or expanded into new domains?