Fateful Encounters: Transnational Flows of Culture and Politics

The University of Chicago Center in Beijing

20th floor, Culture Plaza
No. 59A Zhong Guan Cun Street
Haidian District Beijing 100872

The workshop “Fateful Encounters: Transnational Flows of Culture and Politics” was held on August 1, 2026, at the University of Chicago Center in Beijing, bringing together more than 60 scholars, researchers, and academic leaders from institutions in China and abroad.

This interdisciplinary international workshop brought together scholars in history, sociology, anthropology, literary studies, cinema and media studies, and related fields from China, the United States, the Czech Republic, and the United Kingdom to examine how culture, politics, and knowledge have been mutually constituted through transnational circulation since the nineteenth century. Spanning themes from colonialism and decolonization to the Cold War and the Third World, and from Afro-Asian solidarity and transnational media networks to gender practices and knowledge production, the workshop explores the encounters, dislocations, negotiations, and processes of translation that have unfolded across regions, languages, cultures, and political systems. 

Rather than treating transnational exchange as a seamless process of connection, participants emphasized its asymmetries, frictions, and contradictions, asking how ideas, cultural forms, political imaginaries, and systems of knowledge were transformed as they moved cross borders. Together, these presentations illuminated multidirectional circulations as a complex and uneven historical process shaped by shifting relations of power, ideology, and locality. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, the workshop reconsidered the role of transnational mobility in the making of the modern world while advancing new methodological and theoretical approaches to global cultural history and transregional studies. Meanwhile, it highlighted the continuing resonance of these historical trajectories for understanding contemporary debates on geopolitical realignment and the circulation of knowledge in an increasingly interconnected yet fragmented world.