FROGBEAR is a research and training network aimed at fostering scholarship of East Asian religions through opportunities for field visits, skill building, study, and knowledge sharing. One goal of FROGBEAR is to make the disciplines of Asian Religions and Buddhist Studies more diverse, inclusive, and accessible. We are committed to gender and ethnic diversity, institutional breadth, and intergenerational collaboration at all levels of our activities, including governance, research, training programs, field visits, teaching, conferences, and workshops. We encourage the incorporation of gender, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity into all of our activities and aim to make them more accessible to scholars who may be disabled or acting as caregivers.
Our international team of researchers will advance the study of East Asian religions by identifying, analyzing, and disseminating significant new textual and visual sources preserved in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam over the next seven years until the project ends in 2023. We bring together researchers, institutions and students for on-site investigation, workshops, and conferences. The project surveys key sites of religious practice and strategic nodes in the dissemination and preservation of religious knowledge in East Asia. The focus is on the long-term production and transmission of religious knowledge in Sinitic written and cultural systems. The project creates a forum for collaborative and interdisciplinary analysis of textual and visual sources that were integral to pre-modern religious people across East Asia and continue to be utilized by present-day Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese communities within East Asia and overseas. To access, record, and interpret this material we draw on a worldwide network of institutions and scholars, each contributing different skills and resources, with a robust infrastructure for online storage and dissemination of the results of our research. The insights we produce and publish will change what we know about East Asian religions and how we know it, from the ground up.
