About Us Area Studies at the HCIAS

Area Studies have a long and multifaceted history that cannot be understood solely through their institutional consolidation in the second half of the 20th century. Their genealogy includes various forms of regional knowledge that emerged in the 19th century, tied to philological traditions, civilizational studies, diplomatic missions, and colonial knowledge. Orientalist schools in Europe, Ibero-Americanist studies in Spain and France, and African and Asian studies programs in imperial contexts are early examples. These forms of regional knowledge were deeply embedded in projects of domination, classification, and the administrative ordering of the “other” (Said, 1978; Dirks, 1992; Marchand, 2009).

These early forms of regional knowledge varied across geopolitical contexts. In Europe, and particularly in Germany, Area Studies evolved within a complex interplay of colonial entanglements, Orientalist traditions, and postwar reorientations (Marchand, 2009; Liebau & Nötzold, 2011; Ernst, 2016; Höpp et al., 2002). While German Orientalism developed in dialogue with imperial logics, it also retained a strong philological and historical focus (Marchand, 2009; Drost, 2014). After World War II, Area Studies in West Germany were reshaped under the influence of American models and Cold War imperatives, yet they maintained a fragmented structure—often organized around language-based regional studies such as Lateinamerikanistik or Afrikanistik (Liebau & Nötzold, 2011; Hornidge & Mielke, 2017; Middell, 2019). 

In Latin America, meanwhile, Area Studies have emerged through more heterogeneous and contested trajectories. On one hand, the region was often the object of externally driven research programs shaped by Cold War geopolitics, U.S. foreign policy, and North-South academic cooperation (Joseph, 1990; Moraña et al., 2008; Rojas, 2001). On the other hand, Latin American scholars cultivated critical and regionally rooted epistemologies, including dependency theory, liberation philosophy, and decolonial thought (Cardoso & Faletto, 1969; Dussel, 1994; Quijano, 2000; Santos, 2018). Intellectual traditions such as indigenismo, Latin American Marxism, and critiques of Eurocentric science challenged the externally imposed categories and disciplinary frameworks of traditional Area Studies (Coronado, 2021; González Casanova, 2006; Mignolo, 2000). Across both contexts, debates over the epistemic location of regional knowledge—whether it should serve national, disciplinary, or critical agendas—have long shaped the field.

However, it was in the context of the Cold War that Area Studies took on a recognizable institutional form, particularly in the United States, through major public funding programs like the National Defense Education Act (U.S. Congress, 1958) and the creation of specialized centers at universities such as Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford (Engerman, 2009; Szanton, 2004). This period marked an epistemological reorganization aimed at producing strategic knowledge about key regions of the world— “the Third World,” the Soviet bloc, East Asia—often under the logics of geopolitical containment and national security.

This history has generated a constitutive tension within the field: Area Studies have functioned both as tools of imperial power and as spaces for situated critique. They have promoted language acquisition, deep contextual understanding, and holistic approaches to social worlds. Yet, they have also reinforced spatially fixed categories and externally defined subject positions. This ambivalence has been noted by influential scholars like Clifford Geertz (1983), who defended regional studies for their interpretive sensitivity, and Benedict Anderson (1983), who used a regional lens to construct a global theory of nationalism. 

Since the 1990s, the field has undergone deep critical revision. The fall of the Soviet bloc, the intensification of globalization, and the rise of postcolonial and decolonial thought have pushed scholars to question the epistemological and geographic boundaries of Area Studies. Arjun Appadurai (1996) argued for moving beyond “area” thinking to frameworks attentive to transnational flows, global imaginaries, and deterritorialized cultural contexts. Scholars like Louisa Schein (1999) and Madeleine Reeves (2014) have emphasized the need to treat areas as contested formations shaped by knowledge hierarchies and geopolitical positionings. More recently, Mielke and Hornidge (2017) have proposed the idea of a “third wave” of Area Studies, which does not reject prior traditions but seeks to renew the field through the lens of mobility and co-produced knowledge. This wave understands regions not as fixed entities but as dynamic formations constituted by social processes, mobilities, disputes, and translocal assemblages. It calls for moving beyond “methodological nationalism” (Chernilo, 2006; Sager, 2016; Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002) and rethinking the spatial concepts and methods used in research. Area Studies has the potential to deprovincialize Western fictions of universality and build global scientific disciplines, in entanglements between variously situated contexts of knowledge production (Rodríguez, Boatcă and Costa, 2010; Santos and Ruvituso, 2024). 

These debates are not only of historical and conceptual importance; they also carry implications for how institutions engage with regional research today. At the HCIAS, we build on these critical and recent reflections on Area Studies. We aim to actively contribute to these debates based on an approach that combines the richness of regional traditions with critical openness to new spatial imaginaries. From our perspective, Area Studies remain fertile ground for contextual, multilingual, and committed knowledge while also responding to emerging ethical, methodological, and political questions shaped by contemporary global realities.

In light of this context, our approach to Area Studies is:

• Interdisciplinary, integrating perspectives from anthropology, sociology, political science, linguistics, communication science, gender studies, history, literature, and cultural studies.
• Language skills: Knowledge of key languages necessary to understand social phenomena.
• Critically situated, acknowledging our institutional, epistemological, and geopolitical positions in the production of knowledge.
• Collaborative: cultivating research partnerships with excellent scientists in the region and promoting exchange between students for mutual learning.
• Relational, understanding Ibero-America not as a closed or homogeneous unit, but as a dynamic, entangled macro-region in constant transformation and dialogue with other world regions.
• Comparative, acknowledging the importance of integrating context-specific insights from area studies with the systematic rigor of comparative methods, facilitating cross-regional empirical research.
• Attentive to mobilities, embracing methods that allow us to trace trajectories and infrastructures beyond national or disciplinary boundaries.
• Context-sensitive and responsible, being attentive to local meanings, power dynamics, and institutional settings while being accountable to both the scholarly community and those affected by our research.
• Permeable, which in times of digitally-networked public spheres means that public discourse may cross the realms of areas. Thus, conceptions and the validity of areas must be constantly assessed against the background of shifting boundary conditions imposed by digitalization.

Guided by these principles, the HCIAS seeks to actively contribute to contemporary debates and the continued development of Area Studies.

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