Projects
The Precarious Lives of Ordinary Men
An Asian Urbanism project
This project highlights the stories of Chinese labor migrants in the Netherlands in the early 20th century through the lens of their Personal Cards — documents used by the Amsterdam city administration to register inhabitants and their families. Using publicly available materials found in the Amsterdam City Archive, Jiun Tan constructs short biographies of Chinese immigrants in the archival record.
The Global Asia Podcast
A podcast series on scholars of Global Asia
The Global Asia Podcast is a podcast series profiling researchers of Global Asia and their ongoing work at NYU Abu Dhabi.
This podcast highlights the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of our research on Global Asia. It is a platform for our researchers to discuss how they came to their profession and the personal stories behind their academic research.
This series also documents projects related to Global Asia and our course offerings.
Geopolitics and Ecology of Himalayan Water
An interdisciplinary teaching and research lab
As the climate crisis worsens, a vast swath of Asian countries for which the Himalayan water supply constitutes the most important lifeline, are faced with mounting insecurity. This initiative also aspires to become a teaching lab for making interdisciplinary connections and drawing parallels across a wide range of human-environment problems. Areas of research will cover history, science, engineering, data, geopolitics, anthropology, food security, film, policy design, writing, etc. and advance the agenda of interdisciplinary research and collaboration across the divisions. For more, click here.
Confronting Environmental Change in Asia
"Historical and Contemporary Perspectives," a workshop sponsored by the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute, Feb 19-20, 2024
Environments, and climates, change. They have before, and they will again. To say as much need not weaken resolve in recognizing the onset, and the stakes, of the Anthropocene. In Asia—home to sixty percent of the world’s population, living on only thirty percent of Earth’s land—the stakes are especially high.
To find out more, click here.
Port City Environments in Global Asia
Research and Pedagogy: Redesigning Studies of Asia
“Port City Environments in Global Asia” is a project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation to rethink and redesign studies of Asia. The Second Annual Conference was held on February 2020 at the NYU Abu Dhabi Conference Center.
Unearthing Xinjiang
A new framework for studying Xinjiang history
Xinjiang is a made place, the expression of complex social relationships that have yielded what is today a region of the People’s Republic of China, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. This course is about the people, peoples, and polities, as well as the ecological and environmental factors, that have turned the space that Xinjiang occupies into the place of Xinjiang today. The course design will be modular. Units address key archaeological sites, explore histories of excavation, and explain how the on-going “unearthing” of Xinjiang makes it one of the most complex places in the world today.
I Got One
A shared online think tank for Chinese characters
NYU Abu Dhabi’s Global Asia Initiative was a proud sponsor (AY 21-22) of this crowd-sourcing website, which collects and shares learners’ strategies in studying Chinese characters. In addition to the orthodox method of analyzing the semantic and/or phonetic parts of a character, it provides a virtual space which allows innovative methods from the learners’ perspectives that often closely related to comparative insights into their first languages, diverse cultural backgrounds, individual’s intercultural experiences, and knowledge from cross-disciplinary interactions, etc. In its three years of piloting, it received more than 2,500 contributions from over 200 learners.
See where it is now here.