The workshop at ZMO within the Crossroads Asia programme seeks to explore the shifting meaning of regional belonging across the neighbouring regions of South and Central Asia. It proposes to read the transregional interaction here in terms of social, economic, cultural and religious interaction. It thereby focuses on new forms of clustering of such patterns of interaction which allow for new forms of belonging. They can be more local but also more expansive than previous notions of area and region challenging the political area studies logic of the cold war period based on bounded areas. The re-emergence of assertion of cultural, religious and social belonging equally challenges administrative and political logics in various localities as well as across conventional regional boundaries.

The workshop connects with similar debates on “cross-cultural interaction” reflecting historical processes that have “worked their effects across the boundary lines that historians and area specialists commonly draw” (Bentley 2005, 2). Such interaction inevitably raises issues of agency and structure, political and state actors, values, markets and opportunity spaces in a dialogue between the local and the translocal that can transform into the transregional and global.

The workshop invites the submission of papers that analyse and discuss contemporary and modern historical representations of such interaction in the regions stretching from West Asia to South and Central Asia across conventional regional divides. The papers should focus on representations and aspects of interaction of individual or institutional actors as well as on interaction through networking, movement and migration. Such research is expected to provide new insights into the dynamics of changing social ‘figurations’ (Elias) thus making a contribution to reflecting and understanding the unfolding of new and traditional forms of mobility and the resulting changes in local and regional attachment. As such it will directly relate to the research agenda of the Crossroads Asia programme.

Interested contributors should send an abstract of max. 300 words by October 15, 2013, together with a current cv/resume. Selected papers are expected to be drafted and mailed for mutual circulation among the contributors by January 31, 2014. The Workshop is to be held on 21 March 2014 at Zentrum Moderner Orient Berlin. The papers will be revised after the workshop by April 30, 2014 with a view to publish them in an international peer-reviewed themed journal publication. Funding of travel and accommodation is available on application basis for potential participants who also agree to join the publication project.

Applicants are invited to send their submissions to the workshop email address: CrossroadsWorkshop2014@zmo.de.