IIAS: Nurturing Intellectual Echange and Lasting Connections

Casualness seldom sits with the genre of the testimonial, especially when the testifier’s purpose is to convey a sense of the value of her experience as allowed by an institution which has so immensely contributed to shaping her trajectory and continuously fosters intellectual engagements on a global level. To open this text with such a word may thus sound, at best, like an eyebrow-raising provocation. And yet, from the focus of my forthcoming book, Casual Assemblies, to the atmospheres of the Inspirational Sessions and other collective activities among the fellows, the very idea of casualness best encapsulates the pleasurable atmosphere of academic work which I consistently felt at the Institute between September 2022 and January 2024. Casualness, because IIAS is one such institution which manages to generate intellectually productive activity while preserving informality and cementing joyful sociality.

While I was initially lucky to have been selected for a ten-month fellowship, it is this space for genuine engagements through friendship, which led me to prolong my stay in Leiden without much hesitation when I was equally lucky to be awarded another grant by the Wenner-Gren Foundation to complete my book manuscript. Not only can one hardly imagine a better place than IIAS to pursue such a writing project. Beyond that, IIAS offers an environment where the pressures of public performance (say, theatricality) are largely kept at bay. In such a context, the promise of academic life – what I think brought us all here initially? – materializes: the possibility to think, if only slowly, and debate, without the anxieties which sometimes prevail outside. For truth be told, this promise, however obvious, is precisely what the neoliberal University now so often fails to deliver. In other words, IIAS is where what I (we?) thought were, or ought to be, the value of being in academia, came into being.

While in Leiden, I have thus been able to devote my time almost exclusively to my first monograph, Casual Assemblies: Afterlives of Socialist Performance Culture in Beijing’s Public Parks, which will be out this year with Amsterdam University Press. In more evocative terms perhaps, this involved long conversations (and laughter) about meaning and affect, or about ventriloquism, with those who have now become dear friends – Carmina Yu Untalan, Jean-Thomas Martelli, Aditya Kiran Kakati, Soheb Niazi, and other like-minded fellows who, much like the “revolutionary cousins” in Cultural Revolution opera Hong Dengji (The Red Lantern), “are too many to count”. In the University’s library, I was able to delve into vast collections of material published in the Maoist decades, from Gequ magazine to song books, allowing me to better incorporate discourses on revolutionary songs, public performance, and musical/political affect. This aspect of the work proved crucial to buttress some of the arguments made in the manuscript. 

Needless to say, for early-career scholars in the humanities and the social sciences, the possibility to be relieved from other obligations in order to produce not just an improved version of one’s PhD dissertation, but a high-quality monograph, is crucial. For one must bear in mind that outside of IIAS, we are dealing with a neoliberal academic life that demands time and energy for things such as designing “efficient” research project acronyms or advertisement-like communication. IIAS successfully manages to preserve its fellows by keeping such oddities at bay. Perhaps it is what I am tempted to call the untimeliness of IIAS in that respect that makes it an all the more timely institution, one which can routinize healthy academic practices, not to mention its active contribution to creating an infrastructure for transnational exchange and reshaping the map of knowledge production.

From affinity-based engagements among the fellows to the organization of formal workshops – an opportunity I was generously granted by the IIAS  -, the collaborations allowed by the fellowship in Leiden are long-lasting and rhizomatic.

Having co-organized, with Soheb Niazi and other fellows, a Roundtable on academic sociality at the last ICAS Conference in Surabaya, I was able to create connections between IIAS colleagues and alumni with my own collaborators from previous projects. 

Back in my home institution, the Université Libre de Bruxelles, I was quick to invite Leiden University colleagues and former IIAS fellows – now conducting their research in Lisbon or elsewhere - as guest lecturers in my classes, allowing my students to engage in meaningful exchanges about Okinawan ethnicity or the platform Xiao Hongshu. Simply put: IIAS unlock new exchange possibilities—both within its walls and far beyond them.

Lisa Richaud earned her PhD in Anthropology from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (2016). She has received fellowships from the Belgian National Funds for Scientific Research and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Her first monograph, Casual Assemblies, will be published by Amsterdam University Press in 2025.