Professor Ed Aspinall shares his journey into Asian Studies, which began when he lived in Indonesia as a teenager while his father worked as an agricultural scientist in Malang, East Java. This experience sparked a lasting passion for the region, leading him to study Indonesian at school and university, and later become involved in activist networks supporting Indonesian student movements in the early 1990s. This activism inspired his honours thesis and eventually a PhD on opposition movements under the Suharto regime, with his supervisor Harold Crouch advising him to spend a year living in Jakarta to — an immersive fieldwork approach that has since defined his research.

Over his career, Ed has tracked Indonesia’s political history through books on democratisation, the Aceh separatist conflict, and money politics in elections. His most recent major work, Mobilizing for Elections, co-authored with colleagues from Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand, compares patterns of electoral mobilisation across Southeast Asia. A long-standing member of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA), Ed served as Vice-President and then President from 2017–2020 and co-authored the landmark report Australia’s Asia Education Imperative. He reflects that while Indonesian and Asian studies remain comparatively strong in Australia, the field faces real challenges around declining language enrolments, institutional vulnerability, and the need to embed research more deeply in the region — calling on Asianists to keep pursuing world-class research, building research networks, and championing Asian language education in schools.

Watch Ed’s interview below or on the ASAA’s youtube channel here. See the other interviews in the series here.