Public support for South Korean President Moon Jae-in has plummeted. Peaking at 83 per cent following his agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to end the Korean War, his approval rating has crashed to 49 per cent — the lowest since he took office. The biggest reason for this drop is South Korea’s weakest […]
“[I]n a supremely ambivalent gesture, the future Buddha leaves behind the many subaltern women who literally define his princely existence to seek a new transcendent state. Is this a protofeminist act or simply another in the apparently limitless reinventions of phallocentrism?” The question—taken from Ashley Thompson’s keynote lecture, which launched the Gender in Southeast Asian […]
In 1826, an English merchant, Alexander Hare, brought a group of people from Malaysia and Indonesia as well as South Africa and New Guinea to an atoll northwest of mainland Australia in the Indian Ocean. Hare took them to the Cocos (Keeling) Islands as indentured workers, slaves and/or convicts. A year later, a Scottish rival, […]
Transitional Justice in Nepal: Interests, Victims and Agency has recently been published by Routledge as part of the Routledge/Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) South Asian Series. In the Maoist heartland in Rolpa I met a female ex-combatant from the People’s Liberation Army (the Maoist rebels’ army). She explained to me that before the conflict […]
The 22nd Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) brought together a group of scholars from around Australia and the region with a shared interest in disability in Asia. Asian studies conferences are not a usual venue for the meeting of scholars of disability, but the 2018 ASAA conference provided a unique […]
The dismantling of the White Australia Policy in the second half of the twentieth century ushered in a new multicultural Australia, whose diversity is reflected nowhere more clearly than in the populations’ increasingly heterogeneous religious landscape. As Gary Bouma points out in his insightful book titled Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the 21st Century, […]
