On 6 March 2026, the New Area Studies Research Centre at the University of East Anglia, UK, will be hosting a one-day symposium: New Area Studies / New Century: 25 Years In. Professor Claudia Derichs will give a talk there entitled Blaming, claiming, shaping: New trends in Area Studies.
Area Studies have gone through a vivid trajectory from serving geopolitical purposes during World War II and the Cold War towards defending their raison d’être in competition with so-called systematic disciplines. A particular discursive terrain is occupied by attempts to align Area Studies with the study of International Relations (IR). The lecture subscribes to the rather recent notion of New Area Studies and discusses their difference to Comparative Area Studies, which attracted attention throughout the 2000s. A special conceptual angle in New Area Studies is a multi-scalar and relational understanding of the terms “area” and/or “region”, making the notions of “process geographies” and “emotional geographies” productive for doing Area Studies. This encompasses translocal, transnational, transregional and transcultural perspectives, all of which refer to particular conceptions of what the prefix trans is meant to designate. In view of the relationship between Area Studies and disciplines, the lecture proposes a radical out-of-the-box thinking. Examples from Asia and the Middle East – or WANA (West Asia and North Africa) and NAWA (North Africa-West Asia) in a more critical diction – form the empirical base of the argument. They are rooted in close to three decades of research on and in the respective regions, a strong commitment to the principle of “no research about you without you” (“forschen mit statt forschen über” in German), and an equally strong belief in the importance of language skills in Area Studies.