South Asian studies has had a sustained presence in Australia, but the growth of the field has largely been driven by the collective and individual efforts of scholars of South Asia working in the Humanities and Social Sciences across various universities. Government and university support for South Asian studies has waxed and waned and has […]
In November 2019, Edward Aspinall and I convened a workshop on the state of Asian Studies in Australia. Bringing together leading academics in Asian Studies, we discussed the state of the field for the past two decades (2000-2020) across the disciplines (law, political science, international relations, anthropology, history), languages (Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Chinese) and area […]
Following are some personal reflections and observations as to the state of anthropology of Asia in Australia, and its evolution over the past twenty years. I identify two trends that are in tension: a sector-wide neoliberal audit culture and a discipline-wide commitment to World Anthropologies. I suggest that Australian anthropology’s links to Asian Studies and […]
The most significant dynamic that shapes the study of International Relations (IR) in Australia is the relationship between the global/theoretical horizons of the discipline and the focus on the Asia-Pacific. Chart 1 below demonstrates the scale of the Australian study of International Relations, noting particular clusters of scholars at the Australian National University (ANU), Griffith, […]
The global field of Chinese Studies has expanded greatly in line with the rise of China to become the world’s second largest economy. However, this trend is less apparent in Australia, where the domestic enrolment in Chinese Studies and postgraduate level training has been relatively constrained. Where Chinese programs are expanding in enrolment, this is […]
