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, the history profession, area studies, and things like that. And yes, to some extent it’s about how I think things have “gone wrong.”
The article has a long title: “Betwixt and Between Generational, Areal and Digital Divides: Studying Vietnam and Southeast Asia as a Generation X Sinologist in the Age of Globalisation and the Digital Revolution.”
You have to admit though, that title does seem kind of like an “author reveals all” type of title, no?
Ok, maybe not. . . And it’s too wordy, I know, but. . .
This paper appears in a new volume called Fieldwork and the Self: Changing Research Styles in Southeast Asia that was edited by Jérémy Jammes and Victor T. King.
Jérémy and Victor held a conference on this theme right after I first arrived in Brunei in the summer of 2018. So, this volume has been a long time in the making. In the meantime, I wrote and published an article that covers the same topics as this paper but from a different perspective.
That paper is entitled “The Decline of Asian Studies in the West and the Rise of Knowledge Production in Asia: An Autoethnographic Reflection on Mobility, Knowledge Production, and Academic Discourses.”
I guess the gist of these two papers is that I often find myself not in agreement with the majority of people in academia. So, if the majority of people think one way about something, I tend to have a different view of that same topic.
That, in a nutshell, is what gets “exposed” in these papers.
