North American Taiwan Studies Association

The North American Taiwan Studies Association (NATSA) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit academic organization, which was established in 1994. It is operated by overseas Taiwanese students, North American doctoral students, and recent graduates who are interested in Taiwan studies.^[1] The main mission of NATSA is to organize an annual conference in North America in order to facilitate scholarly exchange and publication among researchers and students from different disciplines and area studies who are interested in intellectual dialogues pertaining to Taiwan.^[2]

Activities

Since its establishment, NATSA has organized 21 annual conferences to support North America-based researchers who study Taiwan. Following the success of this expanded format, NATSA hosted its 19th Annual Conference at the University of California-Santa Barbara in 2013. In collaboration with the Center for Taiwan Studies at the University and the Institute of Taiwan History, Academic Sinica, we were able to increase our faculty-level participation to more than 40 while attracting participants from 47 academic institutions from around the world. The 2013 conference theme, Taiwan in Theory, encouraged discussions of how research based in Taiwan might be pushed to make further contributions to theoretical debates across the humanities and social sciences. In 2014, moving forward to become a professional academic association and in celebrating the Association’s 20th anniversary, the organizing committee decided to employ “time” as the primary concept for discussion in order to reflect on the island’s diverse pasts and our association’s rich history simultaneously. The conference theme, The Zeitgeists of Taiwan: Looking Back, Moving Forward, is to explore a collective feeling that Taiwan was “stuck” politically and economically, and that it was at a sort of crossroads, in which difficult decisions needed to be made to avoid future crises, or at least to alleviate a prevailing sense of crisis at various zeigeists.

The 2015 conference, held on June 11- 13, follows the same spirit. The NATSA 2015 conference, titled “Motions and the Motionless: (Dis/Re-)Connecting Taiwan to the World,” endeavours to advance global Taiwan studies by setting Taiwan in motion, both in theory and in practice. To capture something of the dynamics and energies infused in Taiwanese society, this conference draws on an expansive concept of motion through which we hope to attract papers that explore and exploit the term’s potentials and complexities. Over the past few years, those concerned with Taiwan have witnessed it in the midst of a series of fervent social upheavals of various kinds. These are both themselves social movements as well as responses and reactions to a set of other larger streams of economic, political, social, and cultural motions. As a set of islands historically populated by waves of immigrants and impositions of power, however, Taiwan has long been caught up in and composed of motion. The rich connotations of the main theme of “motions” will serve as a catalyst propelling us to place Taiwan in dialogue with the diverse geographical connections and historical contexts around the island and across the globe.

The committee has paid indispensable efforts to gather over twenty distinguished or promising scholars to join this meeting for discussing papers and speaking in our featured events. To keep the discussion in a fluid and dynamic form, it was devoid of one single keynote speech, but created opportunities for the guests and participants to address diverse issues that are related to the conference theme, as highlighted in the next section.

Besides individual abstract applications, the committee members succeeded to also organize three panels, together with one another panel formed by the deadline, submitted to the reviewers for consideration. By December, 2014, students and scholars based in North America, Oceania, Europe, Taiwan and the other parts of Asia submitted their exciting abstracts to the program committee. After a double-blind review system and an exciting panel organizing process, Fifteen panels and one invited workshop, with forty-seven papers, were presented at Harvard University. In addition, two poster presenters came to share their early findings. Due to time and financial constraints, some panelists were geographically motionless this time, but they tried skype presentations to join this truly global conference. ^[3]

Early History

When NATSA was originally founded, it was known as the North American Taiwan Studies Conference and was located on the web at www.natsc.org until August 2006 when it switched to its current address.^[4]

Conference Locations

The annual conferences are held in different locations every year:

Presidents of NATSA

The Presidents of NATSA are elected annually by the membership. They have included:

References