I recently wrote a blog post on how in the 2020s, what we can call activist/progressive scholarship has largely come to dominate in certainly the North American variety of Asian…
As I was having my morning coffee today, an announcement for the latest issue of the Journal of Asian Studies popped up on my screen. I took a look at…
I grew up in Vermont near a small liberal arts college, Middlebury College. Every summer the campus would transform, as the college would hold its “language schools” where students would…
In the spring of 1994, during my first year of graduate school, I took a seminar on Chinese Intellectual History. In that seminar, in addition to weekly readings and discussions,…
Well, no, that’s not what this post is actually about.Instead, it’s just that I recently published a new article in which I “expose” some of what I think about academia,…
I recently published a paper in the journal Research in Comparative and International Education (RICE) entitled “The Decline of Asian Studies in the West and the Rise of Knowledge Production…
When people write about the history of Southeast Asian Studies (or the history of scholarship on Southeast Asian history), they often state that there were biases in the work of…
Knowledge production continuously transforms alongside changes in society and technology. At times, however, societal and technological changes are so profound that forms of knowledge that had previously been considered of central importance get displaced by new ways of knowing.
We are currently living in such a time of profound social and technological change (think globalization and the Digital Revolution), and area studies is a realm of knowledge production that is losing its position of previously held importance.
Interestingly, were we to look back at the rise of area studies in the decades following World War II, another time of profound change (think decolonization and the Cold War), we would find that area studies at that time itself replaced an earlier way of investigating and knowing the world: philology (the study of literary texts).
In this final video in this three-part conversation, we talk about Area Studies in the current age of the global dominance of English. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmu5drDirSU
This video continues the conversation started in the previous post about Southeast Asian Studies. We start by talking about the article “Can There Be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?” by Ariel Heryanto and then move on to talk about Orientalism, Decolonization, Baby Boomer Politics and Sympathetic Essentialism.