Asian Currents

2020 Reviewing Asian Studies, Asian studies

Reviewing the state of Asian Studies in Australia

BY Edward Aspinall

What is the state of teaching and research on Asia-related topics at Australian universities? Do students have more or less opportunity to learn about Asia than in the past? Is there much variation in Asia content across disciplines? Which Asian languages are in decline at our universities and which are on the rise? What are […]

Asian languages, Asian studies, Australia - Indonesia relations, Education, Indonesia

Countering COVID: Innovation in Australia-Indonesia education

BY Elena Williams and Kirrilee Hughes

While the shift to online programs might be unprecedented, adaptability and resilience in Australia-Indonesia educational partnerships is nothing new.

Asian studies, Australia - Asia relations, Japan, Japan - Australia relations

Former ASAA President honoured by Emperor of Japan

BY Michael Barr

Former President of the ASAA, Emeritus Professor Purnendra Jain, has been awarded the highest Japanese honour open to an academic. In a ceremony held in Adelaide on Friday 26 March, Consul-General Shimada Junji awarded Professor Jain the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon in recognition of his “contribution to promoting academic […]

South Asia Studies

EU’s Show of Strong Commitment is Needed for ASEAN Strategic Partnership

BY Chee Leong Lee

Notwithstanding the consensus between European Union (EU) and ASEAN to upgrade inter-regional relations into a strategic partnership in December 2020, the Munich Security Conference (MSC) 2021 has painted a different picture on the ground. Far from attributing any significance to its newly upgraded strategic partner, the MSC’s agenda was largely concentrated on the transatlantic alliance […]

Asian Studies Review

Wang Gungwu Prize Winner 2019

Terje Toomistu, ‘Embodied Notions of Belonging: Practices of Beauty among Waria in West Papua, Indonesia’ vol. 43, issue 4 of Asian Studies Review: 581-599.

Wang Gungwu Prize Winner 2018

Belinda Rina Spagnoletti, Linda Rae Bennett, Michele Kermode, and Siswanto Agus Wilopo, "Moralising Rhetoric and Imperfect Realities: Breastfeeding Promotions and the Experiences of Recently Delivered Mothers in Urban Yogyakarta, Indonesia," 42, no. 1 (2018).

Wang Gungwu Prize Winner 2017

Ian Chalmers, "Countering Violent Extremism in Indonesia: Bringing Back the Jihadists," 41, no. 3 (2017).

Wang Gungwu Prize Winner 2016

Devleena Ghosh, "Burma-Bengal Crossings: Intercolonial Interconnections in Pre-Independence India," 40, no. 2 (2016).

Prize winning articles are available free to access on the journal website.

Latest Books

Women in Asia Series

Women, Work and Care in the Asia-Pacific

Edited by Marian Baird, Michele Ford, Elizabeth Hill
This book provides a comparative analysis of the social, economic, industrial and migration dynamics that structure women’s paid work and unpaid care work experience in the Asia-Pacific region. Each country-focused chapter examines the formal and informal ways in which work and care are managed, the changing institutional landscape, gender relations and fertility concerns, employer and trade union responses and the challenges policy makers face and the consequences of their decisions for working women.

South Asian Series

India and the Anglosphere: Race, Identity and Hierarchy in International Relations

Alexander E Davis
Building on postcolonial and constructivist approaches to international relations, this book argues that the same Eurocentric assumptions about India pervade the foreign policies of the Anglosphere states, international relations theory and the idea of the Anglosphere. The assertion of a shared cultural superiority has long guided the foreign policies of the US, the UK, Canada and Australia, and this has been central to these states’ relationships with postcolonial India.

Southeast Asia Series

Soul Catcher: Java's Fiery Prince Mangkunagara I, 1726-95

M. C. Ricklefs
Mangkunagara I (1726-95) was one of the most flamboyant figures of 18th-century Java. Professor Ricklefs here employs an extraordinary range of sources in Dutch and Javanese—among them Mangkunagara I’s voluminous autobiographical account of his years at war, the earliest autobiography in Javanese so far known—to bring this important figure to life. As he does so, our understanding of Java’s devastating civil war of the mid-18th century is transformed and much light is shed on Islam and culture in Java.

South Asia Series

Sovereignty, Space and Civil War in Sri Lanka: Porous Nation

Anoma Pieris
This ambitious multiscalar spatial study of civil war in Sri Lanka offers an intersectional, de-ethnicised analysis of political sovereignty drawn out by the struggle for territory. Based on vital retrospective findings from the five-year postwar period, when wartime hostilities were still festering, it convincingly links ethnonationalism to postnational border politics, marketisation, militarised securitisation and illiberal democracy. This book argues that internecine conflict exposes the implicit violence within nation-state formations; mass human displacements heighten collective and individual ontological insecurity and neoliberalism makes the nation porous in unforeseen ways.