Symposium Invites Scholars to ‘Deterritorialize’ AI Through an East Asian Lens
A New Academic Call Aims to Reframe Global AI Discourse
A newly announced call for papers is challenging artificial intelligence researchers to step outside Western-centric frameworks and reimagine the field through the cultural, historical, and philosophical resources of East Asia. Titled “Deterritorializing Artificial Intelligence: East Asia as Method,” the interdisciplinary symposium invites scholars to submit proposals that interrogate AI’s dominant narratives and explore alternative intellectual traditions.
The call for papers, hosted on the Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC) resource hub at The Ohio State University, signals a growing movement within the humanities and social sciences to pluralize technology studies. By using East Asia as a methodological starting point rather than a regional case study, the symposium aims to unsettle the assumption that AI’s development and ethical debates should be led by North American and European perspectives alone.
The term “deterritorializing” itself is a deliberate provocation. In critical theory, it refers to the undoing of fixed, bounded spaces—here, the national or civilizational containers that often confine how AI is studied, funded, and regulated. Organizers suggest that East Asian intellectual tools, from classical philosophy to contemporary media ecologies, can offer radically different ways to think about cognition, agency, labor, and machine autonomy.
Deterritorializing Artificial Intelligence: East Asia as Method
The exact themes of the symposium have not been fully detailed in the public call, but the framing invites contributions that span literature, film, history, digital culture, and technology policy. Scholars are likely to explore how East Asian aesthetic traditions, collective models of selfhood, and non-linear narratives might reframe algorithmic decision-making or natural language processing. Others may examine the region’s early experiments with robotics and automation, or the way Confucian and Daoist thought challenges Western notions of intelligence.
East Asia as a Method, Not Just a Region
The phrase “East Asia as Method” echoes a key concept in cultural studies, popularized by the late Taiwanese scholar Chen Kuan-hsing, who argued for using Asia as a reference point to decenter Euro-American theory. Applied to AI, this approach means treating East Asian societies not merely as markets or testbeds for Western innovations, but as sources of conceptual insight that can reshape the entire field.
For instance, Japanese discussions of jinkō chinō (artificial intelligence) have long been entangled with anime, manga, and Buddhist robotics ethics, while Chinese AI policy discourses frequently blend high-tech modernization with state visions of social harmony. South Korea’s rapid deployment of AI in everyday life offers a different model of human-machine coexistence. By centering these contexts, the symposium hopes to build a platform where comparative and transnational analysis can flourish.
Who Is Organizing the Symposium?
The call is circulated through the MCLC site, an established online repository for modern Chinese literary and cultural studies supported by Ohio State. While the individual conveners are not named in the announcement, the venue suggests the symposium will be rooted in humanities departments—likely drawing from literature, area studies, media theory, and science and technology studies.
The invitation is open to researchers at any career stage, and the eventual gathering may take the form of an in-person conference, a hybrid event, or a published volume. Full details on submission deadlines and the symposium date are expected to appear on the MCLC resource page, which regularly posts academic events and CFPs related to Chinese and comparative East Asian studies.
This initiative arrives at a moment when AI is under intense global scrutiny for issues of bias, labor displacement, and geopolitical rivalry. A deterritorializing perspective could help deconstruct these debates by revealing how different cultural logics produce different kinds of ethical and technical possibilities—an urgently needed corrective in a field that often claims universal validity.
Scholars interested in participating are encouraged to consult the original call for papers on the U.OSU platform for submission guidelines and updates.
