Developing New Area Studies in the Post-Pandemic Age

This presentation examines the development of New Area Studies, Capabilities, Well-Being and Health: The State of Play After the Pandemic (with Patrick James, forthcoming, 2024). It considers the state of the literature, examines innovations in methodologies moving beyond the humanities and the social sciences into new approaches including visual graphic data. It argues for New Area Studies to adopt a distinctly interdisciplinary approach ranging from ethnography to big data to understand complex and wicked social and political problems. It develops an innovative theoretical approach, for the first time combining the Capability Approach to wellbeing, and New Area Studies, using our novel research methodology, systemism, to examine where we are post pandemic. Putting into practice our interdisciplinary research we apply comparative approaches to New Area Studies. We look ahead to our hopes for the future of New Area Studies its evolution and changing everyday practice.

Speaker: Prof. Dr. Susan Hodgett is the founding Professor of Area Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. She was Principal Investigator of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Blurring Genres Network: Recovering the Humanities for Political Science and Area Studies, Chair of the 2021 Research Excellence Framework Sub-panel 25, Area Studies; and President of the UK Council for Area Studies Associations (2011-14) currently, Secretary. Her former books on the future of Area Studies are Necessary Travel: New Area Studies and Canada in Comparative Perspective (with Patrick James, Lexington Press 2018), What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities: Blurring Genres (with R.A.W. Rhodes, Palgrave 2021).