Natasha Naidu is a PhD Candidate and Research Associate at the UNSW Faculty of Law and Justice. In this post, she brings the intercultural legal dialogue series to a close with a reflection from the domestic vantage point.
The Blog Series
The intercultural legal dialogue blog series has its roots in a set of panels held at UNSW Faculty of Law & Justice in 2025. The most explicit aim of the panels, and of the blog series, was for academics in Australia to learn from academics from Asia about their scholarly experiences and expertise. The academics profiled also happened to be PhD students enrolled at UNSW Law & Justice, and the academics in the audience often happened to be the supervisors of many of these PhD students. As she explained in her introduction to the series, this was Melissa Crouch’s position. She sought to “hold in tension the fact that we work alongside these scholars in the region, even as we supervise them as PhD candidates”.
Yet, the intercultural legal dialogue project has also had a set of additional aims. In particular, the panels and blogs have sought to profile the expertise of international PhD candidates to the domestic PhD candidates, as well as to facilitate sharing of knowledge among the international PhD candidates. As a domestic PhD candidate at UNSW Law & Justice, this is my position. I have been lucky to encounter the academics profiled in the series as colleagues and as dear friends.
The Divide
There is a divide that exists between the experiences of the domestic PhD candidates and the international PhD candidates in Australia. I have encountered this divide when tapping my student opal card and remembering that my international counterparts are not eligible for student concessions, or when discussing our PhD completion plans and realising that while my fee waiver will extend to four years, my international counterparts’ will end at three and a half. I have also encountered the divide when recognising what this series has sought to highlight: that many of my colleagues from Asia are well-respected and tenured academics with extensive experience.
My experience of entering the PhD program was that my Australian undergraduate degree in law, the minimum entry requirement to the PhD, had not adequately prepared me for the project I am undertaking. This may not have been the case if my PhD was focused on the Australian legal system, or adopted a doctrinal approach, which law students who graduate from an Australian university are well trained in. But my project seeks to understand law in society, specifically by studying a process of labour migration from India to Fiji during the early-1900s. It is, as I have spoken about, a study of “Asia in the Pacific”.
My vantage point, as a domestic student engaged in the doctoral study of Asia, is not unusual. There are many domestic candidates in our cohort who, like myself, are researching legal systems of their family heritage or country of origin. Others are studying legal systems in countries they have travelled, studied or worked. Among our cohort we have domestic PhD students researching India, Bangladesh, China and more. To quote Jessica Marpaung, “the barrier between the national and international is thinning”, as is the North/South distinction. This is particularly so in the Asian Century in Australia.
But the thinning of the North and South, the national and international, means that there is a gap between what I know now and what I need know as an academic immersed in the study of Asia. This is not to suggest there is a deficiency in my PhD supervision. Instead, it is to suggest that while a small group of supervisors and panel members are guiding me as I write the PhD, dozens more are guiding me as I become an academic – foremost my PhD colleagues. It is this gap that my colleagues from Asia, the ones profiled in this series and others, are helping me to bridge.
How they are helping me to bridge this gap is almost by osmosis. It has been in the dozens of quick questions I turn to ask my colleagues in my wing each day, during walks to grab lunch or get a coffee, and in the spirited and loud debates that bounce around the lunchroom. It has been in reading their drafts, in watching them prepare classes to teach, and in lengthy debriefs after supervisor meetings. And it has been in the formal spaces that they have organised: when receiving feedback during work-in-progress workshops and volleying ideas during reading groups.
So, what have I learned? In the remainder of this conclusion, I draw the contributions to the series together to reflect on what I have learned from my colleagues.
On Teaching, Research, Being an Academic, and Each Other
On teaching, I have learned that teaching is provocation. This is a central tenant that we have learned from Upendra Baxi. But, in our teaching, how should we provoke? For Md Abdur Razzak, coming from the deep social challenges in Bangladesh, provocation looks like committing to a teaching ethos of promoting socially responsive legal education. Such an approach sees teaching as a transformative tool which allows him to foster critical dialogue and challenge the status quo around him. Vinitika Vij also engages critique in her approach to teaching in India, which she combines with kindness in the classroom to make sure her students find a safe place for their raw thoughts and ideas.
On research, I have learned that the single-country study stands on its own terms. In the Australian research context, I have observed a trend to frame non-Australian research as a case study, useful for drawing out lessons that can be applied to Australia, internationally or in a comparative study. The contributors to the series have a different message: the single-country study stands on its own. And so, Jessica Marpaung navigates the awkward fit between Indonesian law and international legal frameworks, acknowledging that this oscillation between the international and the local in Indonesia is the work of law itself. And Shanil Wijesinha commits to doing research that makes sense to where he works in Sri Lanka and to who he is. In doing so, he is not just producing knowledge but attending to what that knowledge does or does not do, who benefits or does not benefit, what is made visible or not visible, and who or what is centered or decentered.
On being an academic, I have learned there will be moments of “excitement” and moments of “doom”. Aman invokes this dichotomy when seeking to locate falling standards of academic freedom both contextually, to acknowledge that academic freedom is at threat here in Australia as much as in India, and temporally, to acknowledge previous histories of declines in academic freedom. Both M. Ibrahim and Tirtawening also invoke this duality when describing being an academic in Indonesia. Tirtawening explains the Tri Dharma academic workload in Indonesia and the demands this places on an academic’s time. M. Ibrahim reflects on the burdens and privileges of the many roles he carries as a law lecturer in Indonesia. But all three point to moments of excitement in their roles: as a “sense of measured hope”, by contributing to a shift in students’ perspectives, and in engaging communities through research.
And on relating to each other, I have learned that academic community is both fun and intentional. This year, during preparation for annual reviews and confirmation panels, a trend of pranks has taken off in the PhD offices. It started with photoshopped posters announcing fake book contracts and fabricated prizes. It escalated into some desks wholly wrapped in cling film and toilet paper hanging like a curtain over others. What to some may seem like sleep-deprived PhD students seeking a reprieve, to me was something more. The pranks would appear on days that our colleagues had a big milestone or particularly needed support. They were received with laughter, but also gratitude for how the prank brought levity to the moment. These were fun and intentional acts of academic community. And the main culprits were those who contributed to the blog series (see the post’s cover image for evidence).
So when Shohini Sengupta spoke of “solidarity as care” and “solidarity despite” I knew instinctively that these were not just words. Both she and the contributors to the series embody solidarity in their everyday actions in the PhD room – in ways that are both very entertaining and deeply deliberate. What they model to me is a radically different version of academic community than what I was exposed to at law school, where we rushed from class, to moot court, to internships and clerkships, with little time to care for each other. And in what they are modelling, they are also calling me in: to slow down, to have fun, to both give and accept support, and to see this as a part of an academic ethos which we are deliberately cultivating.
What Do We Owe?
In this conclusion, I have reflected on what I have learned from the contributors to the series. This was a departure from the intended mode of the series which was to engage with and understand the experiences of our colleagues from Asia on their own terms. We chose this mode to highlight the expertise of our colleagues from Asia on their own and without suggesting that their experiences are only worth understanding relative to the contributions that they make while in Australia. But the centering of my experience has, I hope, made visible the contributions that my colleagues from Asia are making in the development of domestic candidates who, like me, aim to develop expertise in the study of Asia.
This contribution raises the question: what do we owe in return? There remains much work to be done in advocating to improve the conditions in which my colleagues from Asia live, study and work in Australia. Last year, the campaign to prevent limiting the 485 postgraduate visa eligibility to those younger than 35 years was a rare example of successful collective advocacy in this space. Today, with international student caps prioritising students from Southeast Asia and the parliamentary enquiry into building Asian capabilities in Australia through education, there is a nascent sense of momentum towards recognising and improving the conditions of PhD students from Asia in the higher education ecosystem. Initiatives which profile the experiences of academics from Asia in Australia may help in building the momentum. The intercultural legal dialogue series has been one such response.
Image: Author’s image.