[KS] CFP Reminder: 2025 Situations International Conference: Precarity and Injustice

[Sungjin Shin]

Dear Korean Studies List,

*Situations* is currently accepting essays for presentation at our annual
conference titled *"Precarity and Injustice: A Global Reckoning of Our
Time."* The conference will take place on October 23-24, 2025, at Academia
Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. If you are interested in the topic, we warmly
invite you to submit a 4,000-word conference paper for presentation. Please
send your submission to situations at yonsei.ac.kr and
skrhee at yonsei.ac.kr by* August
15, 2025*.

See below for details:

*2025 Situations International Conference*

*Precarity and Injustice: A **Global** Reckoning of Our Time*



October 23-24, 2025

Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica,

Taipei, Taiwan



The *Situations* journal has done several issues around the idea of
precarity in the previous years. It is an issue of grave concern these
days, as we witness the damages of climate change, wars, disease, ageing,
racism, militarism, rising unemployment, and low fertility rate
unfolding before
us. While much of the discussion of precarity is geared towards raising our
awareness of crises, articulated with affect, job insecurity, and mobility,
little attention is paid to its articulation with injustice, as in the
cases of the transnationalized, racialized and gendered chain of care and
affective labor on a global scale and the rise of global surrogacy
industries as a solution to infertility. In addition, while justice is a
goal that any society aspires to, the uneven development of geography,
technology, labor condition, gender and sexuality consciousness has not
only polarized our society along race, gender, class, and generational
lines, but also recentered precarity as a symptom of injustice, begging us
to rethink what justice means in light of the great disparity and
increasing precarity on all fronts.

The return of Donald Trump to U.S. presidency moreover brought precarity to
the foreground, and specifically exposed the precarity of minorities and
undocumented migrants, denied the rights of Palestinians to return to Gaza,
and sabotaged the sovereignty of Ukrainians who had fought a bloody war to
keep their country and resources intact, now seeming in vain. Whereas the
unending war in Ukraine illuminates the injustice of the international
geopolitics through which the Ukrainian lives and sovereignty are made
precarious, Trump’s call to “take over Gaza” overwrites precarity with a
discourse of insecurity that regards securitization as privatization and
transaction.

The expanding gentrification in the name of development and the pandemic in
Asia and beyond, moreover, painfully exposed the precarity of migrant
labor, ageing population, first-line care workers and medical respondents,
as well as the hegemony of bourgeois ideology that is making the city
hospital to some, but not others. The emphasis on tight control over
borders since the Covid years has created precarity for
racialized/gendered/nationalized subjects (in the case of the Atlanta Spa
Shooting of 2021) and explicit forms of xenophobia in many parts of the
world where biometrics is fast becoming the cutting-edge means of control
that enables subtle forms of racism and puts democracy in jeopardy.

In Asia, the precarity discourse is usually associated with the dwindling
of the future for the younger generation, which manifests in the rising
cost of living, hiking unemployment rate, lack of an intimate life, and the
quick drop of fertility. These issues raise questions about reproductive
justice (the mounting pressure of raising a family and the increase in the
rate of divorce and singlehood), social alienation and the rise of digital
intimacy, and the outsourcing of care and reproductive labor to migrant
workers and surrogate parenthood that is reconfiguring the notion of kinship.
Therefore, rather than looking at precarity as a singularized frame of
analysis, informed by neoliberalism, it might be helpful to capture how
precarity intersects with injustice, along the global chain of supply and
securitization discourse on border control; and how a renewed politics of
solidarity and coalition, along with an expanded vision of family andkinship,
informed by our relational interdependence, may emerge from our reckoning
with and theorization of the current conjunctures. It is an issue that
requires a global approach

Through this collaboration between South Korea’s Yonsei University and
Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, *Situations *hopes to provide a global approach
to our precarious modernity and grounded analysis of the vexing problems at
hand.



Papers addressing the following topics in Asia and beyond, though not
exclusive to them, are welcomed:



1.     Precarity, intimacy, and reproductive justice

2.     Precarity and the right of mobility in political crises

3.     Precarity and ageing society

4.     Precarity and transitional and/or transnational justice

5.     Precarity and solidarity and coalition building

6.     Precarity, urban gentrification, and natural disaster

7.     Precarity and the remaking of geography and place (refugee camps,
occupy movement for instance)

8.     Precarity, militarism, and peace activism

9.     Precarity, political injustice, and democracy

10.  Precarity, indigeneity, and minority survival

11.  Precarity, climate crisis, and environmental injustice

12.  Precarity, digital divide, and sociocultural exclusion

13.  Precarity, migrant labor, and citizenship

14.  Surrogacy, family values, and heteronormativity

15.  Precarity and queer imaginations



*Keynote Speakers:*

Professor John Nguyet Erni, The Education University of Hong Kong

Professor Anne Allison, Duke University

Professor Sujin Lee, University of Victoria

Professor Shao-hua Liu, Academia Sinica


Early inquiries with 200-word abstracts are appreciated. *We* *invite you
to submit your 4,000-word Chicago-style conference presentation with its
abstract and keywords by August 15, 2025* (the acceptance of the
presentation will be decided based on the 4,000-word paper).



Each invited participant is then expected to turn his or her conference
presentation into a finished 6,000-word paper for possible inclusion in a
future issue of the SCOPUS-indexed journal, *Situations: Cultural Studies
in the Asian Context*. All inquiries and submissions should be sent to both
situations at yonsei.ac.kr and skrhee at yonsei.ac.kr.



Submissions should follow the Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.), using
only endnotes.


*Notes: Accommodation will be provided for participants whose papers are
accepted. Presenters will share twin rooms.*




-- 
Sungjin Shin, Ph.D.
Instructor and Postdoctoral Researcher
Department of English Language and Literature
Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20250731/4b59bc3a/attachment.html>