Places are made by people. People change their physical environment, create their social conditions, grant them names, ascribe meanings to them, and ultimately make them “historically contingent processes.” That is, lived places are constantly in transition.

But people are also shaped by places. No individual lives, communities, or events can occur without a “place,” though “place” can also be virtual rather than physical. Instead of mere settings, places are active contributors to the joys, sorrows, and struggles of living people. And it is in the context of lived places that people express and construct their identity or constellation of identities. Lived Places Publishing titles are stories of people’s engagement with the world in which they find themselves living out their identities. To write about lived places, therefore, is to pay attention to the real-life experiences of people at the most concrete levels where identity meets context.

Books in the Asian Studies Collection present stories of such human experiences in Asia, with an emphasis on their embeddedness in place. Such places could vary in scale and nature: Physical places, virtual places, and even imagined places. They may reach beyond the geographical confines of Asia as well, for instance Asian diasporic communities.

The central aim of Lived Places Publishing course readings is to help college-level students understand Asian culture, society, and history, and build empathy by exploring the intersections of social identity and place.

We seek empirically driven manuscripts of 30,000 to 60,000 words that bear individual and/or collective voices with compelling stories. Authors writing about their own lives are encouraged to submit, as well as writing about the lives of others. For more experienced writers, my role as collection editor will be that of an occasional progress-checker, deadline-reminder, and draft reader. For first-time writers, my role will be that of co-strategist, frequent draft commentator, and general encourager. For those in between, we will develop an arrangement that allows for authorial freedom while providing editorial feedback.