The theme of the 2026 conference, “Transcending Borders: Asia and Beyond in an Age of Multi-Crisis,” reflects the need to reconsider Asia through the intersecting dynamics of migration, mobility, displacement, demographic change, and transregional connectivity. Today, borders are not simply territorial lines dividing sovereign units. They are also legal regimes, infrastructures, institutions, social boundaries, and symbolic formations that regulate movement, shape belonging, and structure inequalities.

At the same time, borders are continually being traversed and transformed. Labor migration, refugee movement, student mobility, marriage migration, diasporic return, youth migration, environmental displacement, and the circulation of ideas and cultural practices all point to the need for a more expansive understanding of how Asia is being reconfigured in the twenty-first century. These processes are not confined to Asia alone. Rather, they connect Asia to wider Eurasian, global, and planetary contexts, requiring forms of analysis that move across scales and beyond conventional regional boundaries.

This year’s conference places particular emphasis on the role of mobility and migration in shaping contemporary Asia and its wider connections. Importantly, this emphasis is not external to SNUAC’s broader research agenda, but deeply rooted in its existing research ecosystem. In recent years, SNUAC has cultivated a broad and interdisciplinary body of work on migration, mobility, displacement, and social transformation through multiple research units and centers.

These include research on youth mobility in Northeast Asia, which examines how demographic change, regional inequality, urban concentration, and precarity are reshaping life-course strategies and movement practices among younger generations. They also include work on refugees, diaspora, and migration dynamics across Eurasia, with attention to war, environmental crisis, social integration, and the reconfiguration of migration routes. In addition, SNUAC’s Center for Asian Migration Studies (CAMS) has advanced comparative and policy-oriented research on migration governance, social integration, and migration databases, while also working to establish broader academic and institutional networks in Asian migration studies.

Taken together, these research initiatives position SNUAC as a particularly appropriate venue for an international conversation on how Asia and its wider connections are being transformed through mobility and crisis. The 2026 conference therefore aims not only to reflect on contemporary migration-related challenges, but also to use them as a lens through which to reconsider the analytical, historical, and conceptual foundations of Asian Studies itself.