The AAS-in-Asia Conference 2025 to be held in Kathmandu, Nepal, is being organised jointly by the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and Social Science Baha. Founded in 1941, the AAS is a scholarly, non-political, non-profit professional association open to all persons interested in Asia and the study of Asia. With a secretariat based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, it has approximately 6500 members worldwide, representing all the regions and countries of Asia and all academic disciplines, making the AAS the largest of its kind.

The AAS also hosts the AAS Annual Conference in North America with some 3000 attendees. The AAS-in-Asia conference series was conceived as a platform for those unable to attend the Annual Conference. It is small in size but has equally wide ranges of sessions, speakers, and book exhibits, among others. The AAS-in-Asia provides a chance for a deep dive into Asian Studies and connecting with like-minded individuals in a different Asian locale every year.

For the 2025 AAS-in-Asia Conference, the AAS is partnering with Social Science Baha, a Kathmandu-based organisation dedicated to furthering the study of and research in the social sciences in Nepal.

Reframing Global Asias: Margins, Modernities, and Mobilities 

By far the largest geographic region in the world, ‘Asia’, as an idealized place, has long invited romanticised and globalising visions. Some argue that, after 200 years of Western hegemony, the world stands at a historical juncture during which Asia will come to dominate global politics, economy, and culture, as well as knowledge production and circulation. The AAS-in-Asia meeting at Kathmandu in 2025 will highlight the tremendous vibrance and diversity of Asian Margins, Modernities, and Mobilities.

The region’s hyper-diversities can be lost in such a singularly envisaged Asia. For example, the discourse of the ‘Global City’ has become synonymous with Asian modernity in which Singapore, Beijing, Tokyo, and Ho Chi Minh City serve as templates for utopian blueprints of Asian Futures. This blueprint stands in stark contrast with the urban, rural, and in-between manifestations of other modernities. One such example is Nepal itself. Previously the cradle of Buddhism, a site to which pilgrims travelled from across Asia to seek spiritual blessing, today’s Nepal, with Kathmandu as its gateway and capital, welcomes mountain trekkers from around the world and also serves as a point of departure for young Nepalis whose modernities are understood and experienced through shifting spatial and social mobilities.

In selecting this year’s theme as ‘Reframing [Global] Asia[s]’, we expect that recentring the relational margins of urban and rural, while focusing on multiple Asian futures, will demonstrate Asia’s many pluralisms, contrasts, and paradoxes.  The conference takes stock of these variegated ‘Margins, Modernities, and Mobilities’ en route to taking up the critical and necessary task of ‘Reframing Asia’.