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…
I’ve been reading a new, and very interesting, book called The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies (Duke 2017) by Fabio Lanza. It is about a group…
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 video, Professor Victor T. King of the Institute of Asian Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam continues his discussion with Professor Ooi Keat Gin, an historian in the School…
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.
I’ve been sick recently, but I have a lot of ideas in my head and so I decided to record a video about them.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the field of Southeast Asian Studies, and how it fits (or doesn’t) in the world today. In the process, I came across some articles in Vietnamese online papers about a recent conference on Southeast Asian Studies in Vietnam that was recently held at Vietnam National University in Hanoi (VNU).
There are different types of knowledge that have been (and continue to be) produced about Southeast Asia, from area studies knowledge produced in places like North America, Australia and the…
A few days ago I had the pleasure of attending two panels on “Emerging and Continuing Trends in Southeast Asian Studies” at The 10th International Convention of Asian Scholars that was held in Chiang Mai. Those panels made me think a lot about Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia.
Then this morning I was reminded of those two panels when I came across a paper (in Vietnamese) that had just been uploaded to the Internet called “Vietnam at the Crossroad of Area and Global Studies: Vietnamese Knowledge on Southeast Asia and New Approaches.”