8th EastAsiaNet Research Workshop

Inter-Asia research group member Sean Golden spoke at the 8th EastAsiaNet Research Workshop organised by the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Vienna (Austria) on 15-17 September 2011.

His contribution to Section A: The Future of Higher Education on East Asia: Concepts and Experiences was entitled Do East Asian Studies really exist?:

Abstract:

I have been actively involved in setting up East Asian studies at university level in Spain since I arrived there from China in 1984 and found that they did not yet exist at that time. The process was long and laborious. By the 1988-1989 academic year we were able to introduce the study of Chinese and Japanese into an official undergraduate degree course and we created a Chinese Studies Centre and a Japanese Studies Centre. It took another 10 years to create an undergraduate degree in Area Studies that included a specialisation in East Asian Studies form a multidisciplinary point of view, still concentrating on China and Japan but also introducing Korean language studies. Five years later the Spanish government formally created an official undergraduate degree in East Asian Studies. During this entire process I was involved in university administration as a Dean of a Faculty and as a member of the Governing Board of the university. I also acted as an adviser to the regional and national governments and published studies of how to organise East Asian Studies. On the basis of this experience I would like to comment on the question “Do East Asian Studies really exist?” By this I mean to ask whether or not it is possible to carry out coordinated studies of an area recognised to be “East Asia” from a variety of humanistic and social science disciplines, or whether what we call East Asian Studies is simply the sum of a various uncoordinated academic offers based on Chinese Studies, Japanese Studies, Korean Studies, etc. A debate on this subject might make it possible to formulate some basic EastAsiaNet guidelines for the organisation of East Asian Studies.