North American Taiwan Studies Association

TOWARD AN OTHERWISE IN TAIWAN AND BEYOND

The NATSA 2025 conference continues our three-decade tradition of fostering a space for scholars focused on Taiwan across disciplines. Thoughtfully engaging with the rich foundation of existing scholarships on Taiwan, the NATSA 2025 conference seeks to uncover new possibilities through original and insightful inquiries into Taiwan. We invite all participants to consider questions including: What are alternative ways of knowing and alliance-making? How do we imagine networks of care at a time when multiple disparities remain unrecognized?  What are the tensions when we try to center Taiwan for transformational knowledge-building and world-making? 

 

The NATSA 2025 conference invites participants to collectively work towards a vision of the “otherwise.” The “otherwise” is a flexible framework embraced by fields closely linked to social movements—such as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. The NATSA 2025 conference strives to adopt this framework as a space for alternative approaches to care and critique, aiming to reconsider oppressive realities by investigating research, theories, and methods that challenge dominant epistemologies and unjust structures to envision new modes of scholarly engagement. Additionally, by cultivating dialogues between this framework and Taiwan Studies, the conference aims to foster collaboration among diverse voices and perspectives, extending beyond the confines of academic disciplines, nation-state geopolitics, and identity politics. In this spirit, we hope to recenter marginalized aspects of Taiwan and interrogate traditional disciplinary methodologies, boundaries, and narratives that have governed Taiwan studies.