The York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) will host its second international graduate student conference on April 26 and 27 at the Glendon College campus.
Organized around the theme of (Re)Constructions: Researching and Rethinking Asia, the conference will present graduate research 
work that rethinks the epistemology and methodology of researching Asia, and reconstructs conventional categories and frameworks from a broad range of disciplines.
The conference is organized by a committee of the centre’s graduate associates who have been planning the conference over the past year, including Vanessa Lamb (geography), Megan Youdelis (geography), Kasim Tirmizey (environmental studies), Akiko Takesue (visual arts/art history), Regina Lam (music), Catherine Cua (études francophone), Kenneth Cardenas (geography) and Kaitlin Weedmark-Kish (environmental studies). Professor Jean Michel Montsion of the International Studies Department at Glendon, is the conference’s Faculty adviser.
“Our graduate associates have convened a truly interdisciplinary and international gathering, and have developed a critical vision for the conference that will set out to evaluate what it means to study ‘Asia’,” said YCAR Director Philip Kelly.
More than 50 presenters from India, Australia, Singapore, Germany, Finland, England and across North America will showcase cutting-edge research on political ecology, orientalism and re-orientalism, media and technology, nationalism, urban studies, literature and translation, political economy, diasporic narrations, tradition and modernity, and musicology.
Keynote speaker Tania Murray Li will discuss the narratives of orientalism and anachronism within discourses on modern Asia in a talk, titled “Asian Futures, Old and New”. Murray Li teaches at the 
Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy and Culture of Asia.
Tania Murray Li
The conference is open to all students, faculty and community members. To assist with preparations, RSVPs are requested by April 20 to ycarreconstructions2013@gmail.com.
The conference is supported by the Royal Thai Consulate General Toronto and the Vietnamese Culture and Science Association of Toronto; in addition to York University units: YCAR, the Centre for Global Challenges, the Faculty of Graduate Studies, the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, the Principals Office of Glendon College, the Graduate Students Association, the Graduate Association of Geography Students, the Department of Geography and the Department of Visual Arts.
For more information, visit the (Re)Constructions: Researching and Rethinking Asia conference website or e-mail ycarreconstructions2013@gmail.com.