North American Taiwan Studies Association

Heteroglossia can mean the coexistence of plurality and difference, an openness to distinct perspectives and voices; it can also stand as an appeal for respect toward the other—not a unity achieved through reconciliation, but a regard for actions and consciousnesses that remain independent and unmerged. Heteroglossia also raises several questions, such as: whether a plurality of voices demands substantive exchange, or whether coexistence alone is enough. How do these groups embrace seemingly contradictory demands of plurality on the inside, while maintaining cohesion on the outside?

 

As Taiwan Studies continues to mature from its Cold War era foundation as an alternative Sinology into its own distinct field of study—and as its scholars approach the study of Taiwan from increasingly diverse disciplinary formations, methodological approaches, and theoretical investments—the potential for gaps between methodologies and assumptions increases. This demands some retrospective dialogue to discuss what it means to be a Taiwan Studies scholar. The 2027 NATSA conference theme, “Heteroglossic Taiwan: Dialogues Across Many Voices,” employs heteroglossia as the key concept, aiming to highlight the plural coexistence that already characterizes Taiwan Studies both within and beyond the field.  

    

The 2027 NATSA conference theme of heteroglossia builds upon previous theoretical advances in Taiwan Studies, including the integration of contributions from Indigenous Studies as well as finding dialogue with Asian-American and Gender Studies. Scholarships in diverse disciplines have brought new critical perspectives to the field and expanded the range of histories and objects legible under the remit of Taiwan Studies. Nonetheless, these new perspectives may not naturally agree with each other. The imagined Taiwan is multiplicitous and calls for critical reflection. The idea of heteroglossia, or voices coming from different positions, is useful when studying a contested state such as Taiwan. Taiwan's colonial history and ongoing geopolitical tensions inexorably raises questions about whose voices shape broader narratives.

 

Welcoming multiple voices, the 2027 annual conference of the North American Taiwan Studies Association encourages submissions that engage with this concept of heteroglossia in their own research field.

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Potential Questions

 

We welcome submissions that address the following sets of topics:

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Speaking Positions and Authority

• Among the many voices speaking about Taiwan, which have been dominant and which have remained peripheral in shaping academic and public dialogue?  How has this uneven distribution of voice contributed to the narrative of the history of Taiwan studies, and what would that history look like if it were told from a peripheral position? 

• From where do you speak in your research, and how does that position shape what counts as evidence, argument, or authority? How does your own disciplinary training, institutional location, or linguistic repertoire condition the Taiwan you are able to describe?

• How do existing institutions and structures enable different voices to coexist, and how do they produce alignments among them? Mainstream institutions—legal, political, economic, and social—tend to encode a dominant cultural structure or majority values, considering minority voices only as noise or exceptions. Do such infrastructures sustain heteroglossia or resolve it into a single narrative, and what would it take to build ones capable of holding differences together without flattening them?

• As emerging technologies increasingly speak to and for us, how do these voices resemble or depart from those that came before? Should AI be understood as a new voice in its own right, or as a mediator that amplifies, filters, and assists humans in unprecedented ways when studying Taiwan? 

• Since AI is built on large amounts of data, what does it mean for Taiwan to maintain its sovereignty when models are trained on global sources?

 

Theoretical Foundations and Methodological Difference

• How do Heteroglossia enter your research, and what might their presence change about how Taiwan is conceived and approached as an object of study?

• What does “Taiwan” become in different disciplines? Should Taiwan studies treat methodological plurality as a coordination problem awaiting a shared standard, or as the condition that makes the field dynamic? What tactics could we employ, or research questions could we raise, to foster dialogues between Taiwan studies and other disciplines?

• Is Taiwan a useful object of study for Sinology, or how should we define the relationship between Taiwan and Sinology in the first place? What might be the virtue if Taiwan is taken not as a case to be absorbed into Chinese studies, but as a voice that is particular, peripheral and plural in its own right?

• How are Taiwan studies shaped by theoretical foundations that do not sit easily together? For example, postcolonial theory, settler colonial studies, nationalism studies and area studies carry contesting assumptions about sovereignty, indigeneity and periodization, and they do not merely supply competing explanations but pose different questions. Does the field cohere because these differences remain unresolved, and what is lost—or protected—by leaving them that way?

• How can Taiwan studies move from occasional citation to real, ongoing argument with neighboring fields? Conversations with Asian American studies, Black studies, Chicanx studies, and Indigenous studies rarely go both ways: some terms cross over easily, some get borrowed without credit, and some don't carry over at all. How do these conversations produce new perspectives and ways of understanding Taiwan? What new readings of Taiwan become possible when its histories of race, migration, and dispossession are placed alongside those elsewhere, rather than treated as parallel cases?

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Taiwan (itself) as a Plural Entity

• How is Taiwan a plural entity, and what holds it together despite—or because of—the tensions that plurality produces? Settler and Indigenous histories, waves of migration arriving under different regimes, and languages that carry various kinds of memories of the same century all coexist within this single island. Is that coexistence a shared condition, an unfinished negotiation, or an arrangement that mainly serves whoever gets to narrate it?

• What happens to Taiwan’s internal plurality when it is addressed from outside—by scholars, by states, by international media? What happens to the agency of the Taiwanese people when outsiders are given the power to speak for them? How can scholarship describe Taiwan as plural without handing that narrative to those who would use it against Taiwan, and should that concern guide scholarly research?

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We welcome submissions from scholars, activists, practitioners, and artists that engage, but are not limited to, the following sub-themes: 

• Anthropocene and More-than-Human Worlds

• Asian Diasporas and Minorities

• Care and Disability Studies

• Collective Memory and Implicit Culture

• Colonialism and Decolonization in Taiwan Studies

• Critical Scholarship History

• Cultural Psychology

• Environmental Humanities

• Gender and Queer Studies 

• Global Asias and Taiwan

• Indigeneity and Indigenous Asia

• Language, Multilingualism, and Translation

• Legal Studies (empirical or normative)

• Nation, Identity, and Political Representation

• Peace, Conflict, and Justice

• Politics of Memory and Cultural Heritage

• Presentation and Reception of Various Art Forms

• Science, Technology, and Society

• Social Inequality

• Socio-Economic Development

• Taiwan Studies as a subfield of Sinology or East Asian Studies

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Important dates (Eastern Time) 

Submission Dates: November 1-December 31, 2026

Notification of Acceptance: Mid-March

Conference Dates: June 11-June 13, 2027

 

General requirements

• NATSA 2027 annual conference will take place at The University of Texas at Austin and will be held in-person only. Virtual participation will not be available.

• The proposal must be written in English, and if accepted, the presentation must also be in English.

• Submissions that are not in the correct format will not be considered.

• Graduate Student Travel Grant Award will be available for application upon acceptance of the proposal.

• All participants, including panelists, are required to register to attend the conference.