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 in Asia: An Autoethnographic Reflection on Mobility, Knowledge Production, and Academic Discourses.”

This article was a contribution to a special issue of RICE on “Transnationally-trained Scholars Working in Global Contexts: Knowledge Production, Identity, Epistemology, and Career Trajectories” that was edited by Phan Le Ha, Rommel Curaming and myself (all from Universiti Brunei Darussalam).

The abstract of the paper is as follows:

“In recent years, the discipline of Asian Studies has struggled to adapt to a changing world and has seen a decline in student interest. A discourse about this issue has emerged that attributes this ‘crisis’ in Asian Studies to various supposed faults in its forms of knowledge production, and that looks with hope to Asia for new forms of knowledge about the region.

“This paper takes issue with this discourse by employing an autoethnographic narrative to examine the ways in which mobility has affected the discipline of Asian Studies. It traces a path, followed by this author and many others, from an affective fascination with a foreign society to the professional production of knowledge. It then examines how this professional knowledge production has transformed under the influence of different forms of mobility (state-sponsored, private, and global digital), transformations that have led to the current ‘crisis’ in Asian Studies.”

In searching for an image to use for this post, I searched for “Asian Studies” on a stock image and video site, and the image at the top of this post was the first to appear.

That picture is not an image of “Asian Studies” but of an “Asian” “studying.” While I did not expect for a stock image site to have pictures pertaining to the study of Asia, this picture fits with some of the issues discussed in the paper.

In particular, Asian Studies emerged at a time when there was a need in “the West” to know about other parts of the world. Now people from all over the world study in not only “the West” but every place imaginable.

In such a world, what is the role of “Asian Studie”? That is a question that I think needs to be asked much more than it is.

The full paper is available here.

Two other papers in the special issue that deal with Southeast Asia are:

“Grounding the transnational: A Vietnamese Scholar’s Autoethnography” by Thanh Phùng

and

“The Making and Transforming of a Transnational in Dialog: Confronting Dichotomous Thinking in Knowledge Production, Identity Formation, and Pedagogy” by Le Ha Phan and Azmi Mohamad