New Course: Southeast Asian History and Web Design
After spending years thinking about how to adapt what I do (teach History) in a way that can fit with the world that the Digital Revolution has created, I think…
Moving Forward in the Era of the Decline of Area Studies & the Humanities
For a long time now I've been witnessing a decline in interest in area studies, the Humanities, the field of History, etc., all of the fields that I was trained…
How May I Help You?
Following up on the ideas in the previous post about how valuable it is to try to understand what "users" of a product/service actually think, and given that I've been…
This Blog Needs UX!! Academia Could Use Some Too!!
I keep thinking about the times we are living in, about how dramatically technology is transforming our lives, and about how the professional world I inhabit (academia/the Humanities/area studies) does…
Premodern Vietnamese Historical Sources, And What Historians Don’t Tell You about Them
As I stated in the previous post, in 1744 Nguyễn Phúc Khoát, the “Nguyễn lord” of Đàng Trong (the southern half of the Lê Dynasty empire) elevated his status from…
Baby Boomer Politics and Southeast Asian History/Studies
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…
Area Studies is the New Philology
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).
The Digital Age World Does Not Need Southeast Asian Studies – And That’s the Problem
Today I stumbled across an article by historian Thongchai Winichakul on “Southeast Asian Studies in the Age of STEM Education and Hyper-Utilitarianism.” Being a fan of Thongchai’s work on Thai history, and seeing that this essay covers a topic that I’m always interested in – Southeast Asian Studies in the current (digital) age – I decided to read it.
It is no secret that the world of area studies in general, and the humanities in particular, are not faring well these days. What I find problematic is that in discussing this issue many academics simply try to argue that area studies (or history or the humanities, etc.) is important because it promotes/teaches critical thinking or certain knowledge that leads to a more meaningful life.
History is Ending. . .
As a blog that has the word “history” in its title, I think we need to pause and talk a little bit about that word, because it’s in the news again. Let me explain.
I used to serve as an undergraduate advisor for a History Department in the US, and in that capacity, I saw that starting around 2012 the number of students majoring in History started to decline rapidly. That decline continued for about 5 years, until the number of majors was around 50% what it had once been.
This same decline in History majors has taken place at universities all across America (and I’m sure in other parts of the world too), and historian Benjamin M. Schmidt has just published a new article about this topic.
Area Studies in a Monolingual (English) World
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