Women's Forum - Asian Studies Association of Australia

The Women’s Forum of the ASAA includes people interested in promoting scholarship on women in Asia or supporting women working within Asian Studies. The Women’s Forum:

convenes the Women in Asia Conference
has a bi-monthly newsletter. To receive the newsletter please email wiaconference2017@gmail.com
coordinates a moderated email discussion listserv
holds a biennial meeting held during the ASAA Conference
supports the Women in Asia book series

Women’s Forum History

The ASAA Women’s Caucus was established in 1978 and changed its name to the Women’s Forum at the 2006 ASAA Conference. The forum has played a significant role in raising the profile of women doing research on Asia in Australia, as well as promoting research about women in Asia.

Newsletters

The Women’s Caucus produced a newsletter 2-3 times a year up to 1997 before being replaced by the Women’s Forum Listserv.

Past editors include:

to 1994: Antonia Finnane
1994-1997: Louise Edwards and Anne Cullen
1997-1998: Andrea Whittaker

View scanned archived newsletters published between 1994 and 1997.

Conference

The Women in Asia Forum is affiliated with the Asian Studies Association of Australia and hosts a biannual interdisciplinary conference.

The 2021 Women in Asia conference is titled Fashioning Gender in Asia,and builds on past Women in Asia conferences and the Women’s Forum of the Asian Studies Association of Australia to further research on gender in the Asian region. The conference explores how gender, sexuality and bodies; objects, culture and memory; citizenship, geography and economy, and technology, media and mobility intersect and entwine in the very fabric of gendered personhoods in/of Asia.

The conference will open with a Public Lecture on Tuesday 23 November, supported by La Trobe Asia, and conclude with a Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher workshop on writing for publication on Friday 26 November.

There are five subthemes to the conference

Fashioning the Body – art, culture, embodiment
Borders Frayed/Reinforced – nation, citizenship, mobility
Stitched Together – law, human rights and social justice
Digital Tapestries – technologies and relationships
Materialities – economy, work, education, welfare

Previous conferences include:

2019 Women in Asia Conference was held at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney on 21-23 June 2019.
2017 Women in Asia Conference, Women in the Asian Century: Challenges and Possibilities, University of Western Australia, 26-28 September. Organisers, Laura Dales, Lyn Parker.
2010: 10th Women in Asia Conference, Crisis, Agency and Change, Australian National University, 29 September – 1 October. Organiser, Tamara Jacka.
2008: 9th International Women in Asia Conference, Women in Asia: Transition and Interchange, University of Queensland, 29 September-1 October. Organisers, Helen Creese, Tomoko Aoyama, Rosemary Roberts.
2005: 8th Women in Asia Conference, University of Technology Sydney, 26-28 September. Organisers, Barbara Leigh, Devleena Ghosh. Program and Abstracts
2001: 6th Women in Asia Conference, ANU, 23-26 September. Organiser, Kathryn Robinson
1997: 5th Women in Asia Conference, UNSW, 2-5 October. Organiser, Jan Elliot
1993: 4th Women in Asia Conference, University of Melbourne, 1-3 October
1985: 3rd Women in Asia Conference, ANU, 11-13 July
1983: 2nd Women in Asia Conference, Monash University, 22-24 July
1981: 1st Women in Asia Conference, UNSW, 13-15 June.

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.