“Asia” in the making: friction, relational authorship, and the pedagogy of productive discomfort in the Asia Documentary Co-Production Network

This article argues that “Asia,” as a category of regional belonging, is not a precondition of transnational collaboration but a relation produced within it—assembled, incrementally and unevenly, in the friction of cross-border documentary co-production. Drawing on the Asia Documentary Co-Production Network (ADCN), a hybrid pedagogical project linking film schools across East and Southeast Asia, it reads the transcripts of monthly online meetings, rather than the finished films, as its primary text. Through a critical autoethnography written from the position of a faculty mentor and former chair, it traces friction in two directions: outward, where students raised in mutual national hostility come to reference one another laterally and so constitute the region in real time; and inward, where an encounter with another nation’s history estranges students from their own. Building a single conceptual chain from Tsing’s friction through platform mediation and radical listening to Chen’s inter-Asian referencing and critical syncretism, the article shows these concepts being enacted at the smallest scale—by undergraduates, over poor connections—and, crucially, where they fail. Against celebratory accounts of frictionless online collaboration, it insists on asymmetry: of resource, of language, and of the mentor’s power to redirect. “Asia” so understood is closer to a verb than a noun—permanently unfinished, and real in the measure of that unfinishedness.