New Area Studies Research Centre

The New Area Studies Research Centre (NASRC) is the University of East Anglia’s interdisciplinary centre for the study and creation of new thinking and scholarship on global cultures of place and space.

Sitting on the cutting edge of the field, the NASCR’s diverse, world-leading research team shares a multidisciplinary, multiregional vision, rooted in communities and their contexts. Their scholarship renegotiates the relationship between the local and the global, speaking directly to the ethical challenges of the twenty-first century while charting new theoretical directions for the field.

Such boundary crossing and genre blurring allows the centre to approach Area Studies from new directions, in which fixed geographical specificities and disciplinary borders give way to broader thinking about social justice and intellectual intersections.

The centre draws together work by UEA colleagues across the breadth of arts, sciences, social sciences, and their intersections: American Studies, Art History and World Art Studies, Film and Television, Global Development, History, Language and Communication Studies, Literature, Politics and the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas.

Directed by Professor Susan Hodgett

Find out more about the New Area Studies Centre

Projects

Building Resilience Through the Arts

A UEA team has been working with some of the most disadvantaged social groups in Colombia, using methods that draw on the creative arts to build a better understanding of their circumstances and support the participation of marginalised groups in policy making.

UEA’s Dr Hazel Marsh, Prof Roger Few and UEA collaborator Dr Teresa Armijos Burneo worked with a team of researchers from Universidad de Manizales, Colombia, to understand how people displaced by armed conflict become exposed to greater risk from environmental hazards. The team worked alongside resettled people to share their stories, in their voices and artistic styles, thereby strengthening awareness of displaced people’s experiences, abilities and needs.

Their collaborative, arts-based approach to knowledge-exchange not only yielded key research findings but also built trust with Indigenous and traditionally marginalised groups and helped generate new support networks and community initiatives among some of the most disadvantaged social groups in the country. The success of their work has informed the development of inclusive institutional programmes aimed at strengthening Colombia’s capacity to manage and reduce risk and the project – and the methodologies used – have helped shift perceptions, practices and policies both inside and outside of resettled marginalised communities in Colombia.

Building Resilience Through the Arts - Research

Finding the Lost Ones

In the late nineteenth century, as the federal government entered the final stages of US nation building with its accompanying conquest and dispossession of Native nations, a glaring question remained unanswered: what should be done with the surviving indigenous peoples who had withstood this onslaught.

Professor Jacqueline Fear-Segal’s research explores how, having forcibly subjugated the warrior societies of the Plains, the government proposed an audacious new solution to the “Indian problem”: deliberate obliteration of all indigenous cultures and assimilation of Native youth into mainstream America through re-education in schools.

Finding the Lost Ones - Research

Fiji in the World

Fijian artifacts are preserved in many museums around the world, notably in the UK.

However, objects were often mislabelled or unidentified and the full extent of these collections unrealised.

Since 2011, the Fijian Art research team, led by Professor Steven Hooper, Dr Karen Jacobs and Dr Katrina Igglesden of the Sainsbury Research Unit at UEA has examined and analysed extensive Fijian collections in over 40 museums in the UK, continental Europe, North America and Fiji.

A wealth of documented material has been uncovered, providing crucial evidence of how Fijian objects were both exchanged as gifts – as objects circulated among kin and between chiefdoms – and exchanged with European traders, missionaries, colonial officers and visitors.

Fiji in the World - Creative UEA

Growing Up Married

Prof Eylem Atakav is Professor of Film, Gender and Public Engagement. Her film Growing up Married (2016) is an internationally acclaimed documentary about forced marriage and child brides living in Turkey.

Atakav created the UK’s first undergraduate media studies module about Muslim women’s representation at UEA, titled ‘Women, Islam and the Media’. With Growing Up Married, her focus is on the stories of women who are rarely represented in the media.