In the 21st Century, Australian universities are home to many international students from around the world. According to Universities Australia, in 2023 there were 66,028 PhD candidates enrolled in a PhD program, and of these 40 percent were international students. Many of these PhD candidates are from Asia.
Some of these PhD candidates are also academics. In many countries in Asia, from Indonesia to India, a scholar may begin their academic career as an assistant lecturer with significant teaching responsibilities and little time or support for research and often, after several years, they may commence a PhD. Some of these scholars take leave of absence to pursue a PhD abroad in countries like Australia, with plans (and often obligations) to return upon completion.
This blog series addresses an issue relevant to Asian Studies in faculties, schools or departments outside of Asian studies programs, namely the increasing number of PhD candidates from Asia studying about Asia, and the corresponding challenges and responsibilities that Australian universities, faculties and academics have to supervise and support these candidates.
In terms of pedagogy, it is often said that scholarly PhD supervision practises are bespoke and responsive to the needs of the individual PhD candidate and their specific research project. If the profiles and research projects of PhD candidates centre heavily on Asia, then how should our pedagogy as supervisors respond?
One response is to match PhD expertise with academic expertise, as occurs in Asian Studies departments or programs in Australia. In these programs, PhD candidates are supervised by scholars who speak the language and who have undertaken extended research on the country or region the candidate is studying. However, this is not the case in other departments or disciplines outside of Asian Studies, such as law.
The reason for the lack of academic expertise in law schools is that most legal scholars are trained primarily in the common law, with some exposure to international law and the common law of Western liberal democracies other than Australia, such as New Zealand, Canada and the UK, as a form of comparative law. Most law scholars also primarily focus on the Australian legal system in their teaching and research expertise. This can lead to challenges for PhD candidates to identify suitable supervisors whose projects focus on legal systems and issues in the Global South. Further, Australian universities are home to many international students, and so both students and academics are working in a diverse cultural context.
In light of this context, I suggest that scholars need to practise and be aware of what I call ‘intercultural legal dialogue’. Intercultural legal dialogue is about creating mutual learning opportunities between scholars from different cultural and legal contexts that can inform and enrich our teaching, supervision and research about law. Through such dialogue, legal scholarly conversations and engagement do not necessarily start from Global North assumptions and experiences of law, but rather seek to maintain open conversations about teaching and research in law that can both start from Global South legal experiences, as well as facilitate South-North/North-South/South-South conversations.
Intercultural dialogue has relevance as a pedagogical practise to all aspects of university education, including the supervisory relationship in PhD programs of law schools. Intercultural dialogue is essential in supervision teams where scholar/s and their candidate come from different cultures and have research expertise across different legal traditions.
Intercultural dialogue is an effort to cultivate a sensibility that helps scholars stay alert to the challenges of intercultural engagement in their research and teaching practises. For scholars who are based at Global North institutions, it compels us to reflect upon the origins and sources of our fields of research and the possibilities of alternative sources of ideas and new knowledge. Such awareness enables us to remain open to different epistemologies, intellectual origins and sources of knowledge.
Building on the idea of intercultural dialogue, intercultural legal dialogue emphasises the relevance of intercultural dialogue to the teaching and research of law, legal institutions and legal traditions. To practise intercultural legal dialogue, we must first recognise the dominance of the domestic legal tradition in legal education (eg Australian law), so that we can then seek to displace and decentre it through dialogue with scholars and students who teach and research in and about other legal contexts. In the context of legal education, such dialogue aims to make explicit the cultural assumptions embedded in legal education, including in supervision practises, in this case at Global North institutions like Australian law schools.
In the context of doctoral supervision in law, intercultural legal dialogue is about supervisors and candidates engaging in dialogue about the students’ research. Specifically, intercultural legal dialogue is about the supervisor learning and gaining an appreciation for the legal education, vocation and cultural background of the candidate, and of their research topic. This enables the supervisor to become aware of their own positionality, and the assumptions about law and legal traditions that they bring to the supervisory relationship. Intercultural legal dialogue foregrounds the position of power that the supervisor and their legal culture occupies, and seeks to generate greater reflexivity on the institutional role they play.
International doctoral candidates are already engaged in significant acts of translation with their supervisors when they undertake a thesis topic concerning a legal system other than Australia and where their supervisors’ expertise is unrelated to the legal system they are focused on. Instead, intercultural legal dialogue emphasises the mutual responsibilities on supervisors and students in such a context.
Intercultural legal dialogue can be a vehicle to facilitate conversations that enhance the capacity of Australian law academics to supervise research projects comparatively. Intercultural legal dialogue insists that law is situated in time and place, and legal education therefore cannot be separated from culture, language and society. Such dialogue draws our attention to where law is located and embedded.
Given the broader concerns about decolonisation across universities around the world, intercultural legal dialogue can also potentially aid a wider agenda of decolonisation within law schools by acknowledging the imbalance of power relations between Global North and Global South universities and scholars.
To foster intercultural legal dialogue, in 2025 we embarked on a series of panels hosted at UNSW Faculty of Law & Justice so that we could learn from academics from Asia about their scholarly experiences and expertise. The blog series draws on the speakers from these panels who are also part of the PhD cohort. Some have more than ten years’ teaching experience, others are early career academics. The cohort is illustrative not only of the internationalisation of PhD programs, but of the growing numbers of experienced academics from Asia in PhD programs at Australian universities.
UNSW’s PhD cohort is among the largest of all 38 law schools in Australia. While there are no current figures, in 2017, government records indicate that there were 800 PhD candidates enrolled in law schools in Australia. If roughly still accurate, this means that UNSW has about one eighth of the PhD cohort in the discipline of law in Australia. In 2025, international candidates are now the majority of the PhD program, and many of these are scholars from Asia.
In this series, we profile the experiences of PhD candidates as academics and learn from their teaching and research expertise. This includes their approach to issues of pedagogy, academic freedom and the nexus between legal education and practise. We aim to facilitate the mutual learning that needs to take place in the context of a supervision relationship. We seek to hold in tension the fact that we work alongside scholars from the region, even as we supervise them as PhD candidates. We also seek to share knowledge among the PhD cohort, profiling the expertise of international candidates to the domestic PhD candidates, and facilitating South-South sharing of knowledge among international candidates.
We asked the contributors a common set of questions. First, we asked them to tell us about their academic position and the institution (faculty/university) they are based at. Some of these universities are private institutions, others are public institutions. Some are secular, some are religious. Most are civilian, but some are military-run institutions. Some are many decades older than UNSW, others are newer universities. We also asked them to tell us about the student body, and their common career trajectory. We were particularly interested in learning about how and why the contributors became academics, and about the formative experiences, events, people or ideas that have influenced their teaching practices.
We also acknowledged that in many countries, COVID-19 is only one of the latest crises to have placed severe economic pressures on society, and that this too has affected universities, scholars and students. In addition, we acknowledged that many countries in the region have recently experienced major political upheavals, violence, or political tensions, from India since 2019, to Sri Lanka in 2022, to Bangladesh in 2024, and Indonesia in 2025. We invited the contributors to reflect on the challenges facing their institution and scholars there. Realistically, we also explored if academic is a feasible profession in terms of making a living, and what the current workload and working conditions are like.
Finally, we explored what the contributors love about being a scholar and teacher. We also asked them to reflect on their experience as a PhD candidate in Australia. While each of the blog posts only provides a small glimpse into their experiences, the contributors offer us a valuable and honest reflection on their academic journeys. In learning about their own academic experiences, it enables those of us who are scholars based permanently in Australia to reflect on our own position, privileges and responsibilities.
To conclude, I would like to thank Shohini Sengupta, Aman, Shanil Wijesinha, and Vinitika Vij for their collaborative efforts and intellect in crafting this event series, and also the wider group who participated in the formative discussions in preparation for this series: Mohammad Ibrahim, Jessica Marpaung, Sinethemba Memela, Ashraf Uddin, Amarnath Boopalam Manjunath, Kazi Abdur Razzak, Tirtawening, Surbhi Karwa, Suhail Rashid Bhat and Ali Salmande. It has been a great honor and privilege to work with you all.
Image: Taken at the first intercultural legal dialogue panel held at UNSW Law & Justice on 12 March 2025. Details of the intercultural legal dialogue panels are available here.