Spilling the methodological tea: Real talk on ways, ethics, and conundrums of historical and ethnographic research in Asia

Humanities research takes an array of forms, and pursues countless questions–but it must inevitably be a human activity. Join us for a very human conversation on the challenges and possibilities of research in Asia. Our panel of scholars has dedicated their careers to exploring questions of empire, ethnicity, and gender among communities across Asia. Through their highly imaginative work, they have drawn together historical and ethnographic methods, and explored new ways of writing about human lives. This conversation will focus on methods—the crucial means of all knowledge production—as an avenue into the personal and ethical dimensions of humanities research.

This talk will be a hybrid talk. Please RSVP here. 

About the speakers: 

Carole McGranahan is professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado, USA, and a scholar of contemporary Tibet and the Himalayas. She is author of Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (2010), co-editor of Imperial Formations (2007) and Ethnographies of U.S. Empire (2018), and editor of Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (2020). She is currently finishing a book on Theoretical Storytelling. 

Megan Bryson is Associate Professor at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. research focuses primarily on themes of gender and ethnicity in Chinese religions, especially in the Dali region of Yunnan Province. The geographical specificity of her work is balanced by its temporal breadth, which ranges from the Nanzhao (649-903) and Dali (937-1253) kingdoms to the present, as reflected in her monograph, Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China (Stanford University Press, 2016), which traces the worship of a local deity in Dali from the 12th to 21st centuries. Bryson has also published several journal articles in such venues as the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and Asia Major.