SOAS CYS 2022 End of Year review
The Centre of Yoga Studies had our AGM recently, and we thought it would be nice to gather all this together and give our followers an end of year review.
Events in 2021-2022
In the 2021-2022 academic year, we ran 15 lectures, book launches and special events, from Gudrun Buhnemann speaking on Mandalas as objects of meditation, to Laura von Ostrowski’s book launch for Text in Motion, as well as a successful in-person summer course, run by Amelia Wood, and our second post-graduate student conference, with 7 presenters, and the support of 3 scholars. This year we’ve had talks from Johannes Bronkhorst, Jacob Schmidt-Madsen, Andrea Acri, Kenji Takahashi and Monika Hirmer already, and we have many more to come. We’re so grateful to all our speakers for such a vibrant programme. We are also finding our way with running hybrid and in person events again, so when booking our events now, do pay attention to the location. We are trying to make as many of our events as accessible as possible, but a very few events this year will be in person only.
See our events programme for more and book on Eventbrite for all our events.
YDYS2022 and beyond
Most excitingly, we co-ran the first global Yoga Studies conference in years, returning to Krakow to join our colleagues at the Jagellonian University in May. YDYS2022 had over 80 papers, 4 keynotes and a lot of conversation and academic collaboration. We are now working with colleagues on helping many of the presenters to publish articles based on their papers. More on that soon.
In fact, there are numerous plans ahead to support the future of Yoga Studies, working with colleagues here in the UK, in Europe and even China. But there’s very little we can officially share as yet, so watch this space, or join our mailing list to be the first to know.
Members
Our work is funded by a very generous external funder, and supported by a small steering group and a list of invited members. We can also announce our new MA rep – Anna Freud, who will also be taking over from the great work of Vicky Addinall on the Understanding Yoga Studies project.
Understanding Yoga Studies
We hope you have already checked out our new content series entitled ‘Understanding Yoga Studies’ – designed specifically to support you to gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the academic field of Yoga Studies.
As a recognised field of academic study Yoga Studies is relatively young. Historically the study of traditions of yoga lived within a number of other academic disciplines; such as philology, Indology, history, religion and anthropology. In a contemporary academic context, studies of yoga have branched into further disciplinary contexts like sociology, ethnography, economics, modern history. This makes the field highly varied, engaging and exciting (we might be biased!) but also potentially vast and overwhelming for scholars new to the landscape.
Every month or two we share an introduction to a different discipline within the field of Yoga Studies including a short outline of the its placement in the field, a spotlight on three relevant academic voices, a short reading list and audio interview with a current academic working within that discipline. The content will be hosted online and circulated via our mailing list and social networks.
- You can see the project on the new SOAS website here:
https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/research-centres/centre-yoga-studies/understanding-yoga-studies
Or get a copy of each new edition via our mailing list here: