【Vanguard Summit 14】The Post-Western Now: Moving Beyond Western-Centrism

◼️ Date: May 19, 2025 (Mon.)

◼️ Time: 9:30 – 16:50

◼️ Venue: Liang Kuo-Shu International Conference Hall, 3rd floor, College of Social Sciences, NTU

◼️ Sign-up Link: https://forms.gle/LgDdYJqffeGHDJ5u7

◼️ Speakers:

Rada Iveković (Independent Academic and Researcher, France)

Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao (Distinguished Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures; Dean, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, National Taiwan University, Taiwan)

Masaki Fujihata (Media artist, Emeritus professor at Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan)

Yuk HUI (Professor of Philosophy and Chair of Human Conditions, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands)

◼️ Symposium Introduction:

The word Post-Western is increasingly being utilized in the last decade or so. It was not just this or that event that caused this concept to appear but the result of converging trends surrounding the worsening crises of Western modernity. The recent disasters of COVID-19, the Ukrainian War and the Gaza humanitarian crisis especially exposed the darkness at the heart of Western modernity, which had been long believed to be human destiny. Critiques of modernity have abounded since Heidegger but most of them have been limited to Western self-critiquing that usually did not enlist resources from other traditions. Without more radical impacts from outside of the comfort zone of Western-centrism, such kind of critiques would not be able to become aware of its limitations, given that the condition for what Yuk Hui terms the “individuation of thinking” has not been established. And in view of this increasingly communalized and conflict-prone world that was most recently further rattled and imperialized by Donald Trump, there is indeed an unprecedented need to re-formulate a cosmopolitanism that could accommodate biodiversity, noodiversity and technodiversity. And undoubtedly this project would have to begin with radically thinking beyond Western-centrism. This symposium is meant to provide an occasion for a tentative forming of the condition of individuation of thinking by attempting to tap resources from what Walter Mignolo calls the “exteriority of modernity” to think about possibilities of a critical cosmopolitanism.

◼️ Agenda:

Organizer: Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences, NTU

Co-organizer: Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, National Science and Technology Council; NTU; ASE Cultural & Educational Foundation