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AN ASIAN TURN? RESEARCHING AND THEORISING

FROM ASIA

5-6 OCTOBER 2017

AN ASIAN TURN? RESEARCHING AND THEORISING FROM ASIA (5-6 OCTOBER 2017)

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A recurring theme is the need to ‘escape’ from and possibly supplant theoretical and conceptual framings, and methodological approaches to research, that have their origins in the historical experiences, geographical conditions and cultural contexts of Europe and North America. In his 1961 paper ‘On the possibility of an autonomous history of modern Southeast Asia’ John Smail espoused “the ideal of an ‘Asia-centric’ history of South east Asia” a process that he thought would be “a painful and confusing business”. Since then the debate has moved onwards and outwards and there have been some notable Asian contributions to this intellectual ‘counter-movement’, including Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2001) Provincialising Europe, Partha Chatterjee’s (2014) The politics of the governed (2004), Syed Farid Alatas’s (2006) Alternative discourses in Asian social science, and Kuan-Hsing Chen’s (2010) Asia as method: towards deimperalization. ARI was established in 2001 and has recently celebrated its 15th anniversary. Scores of scholars from early career postdoctoral fellows through to senior professors have either been staff members at ARI or have visited for varying lengths of time. They come, often, with the aim of testing, re-shaping or challenging the Western-originated approaches and assumptions that may have informed their fields of scholarship, often by drawing on their specific empirical or theoretical work in and on Asia. Many of our early post-doctoral fellows are now established, senior scholars and have made signal contributions to scholarship. In this two-day conference, we have invited former scholars and researchers who are working on Asia for a focused conversation around the following themes:

Researching (in) Asia. The focus here is on how we research Asia; the methods and approaches we employ, the means by which we gather evidence, and the constraints under which that occurs. Is researching in/on Asia essentially the same as researching in/on other places? How and why might it be different and with what consequences?

Theorising (from) Asia. This theme focuses on our conceptual framings and theoretical approaches. This may be about the challenges of applying established modes of thought to the Asian context (what ‘works’, what does not, and why), or about the development of framings from Asia that provide alternative or complementary structurings of knowledge (so theorising from Asia).

Applying (to) Asia. Here the concern is to consider the application of knowledge, both empirically and in terms of policy. How does academic research gain policy and practical traction in Asia? How might established modes of research sit uncomfortably in an Asian context? With growing interest in the social impact of academic research, where does the Asian experience sit?


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5 OCTOBER 2017 (THURSDAY)

09:45 – 10:00 REGISTRATION

10:00 – 10:30 OPENING & WELCOME REMARKS

Jonathan RIGG | Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

10:30 – 12:30 PANEL 1 – APPLYING TO ASIA I

Chairperson Kenneth DEAN | National University of Singapore

10:30 Nation and Religion in Asia

Peter VAN DER VEER | Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious & Ethnic Diversity, Germany

10:50 Neither Here nor There? Chinese Urbanism at Crossroad?

Mee Kam NG | Chinese University of Hong Kong

11:10 The Perils of a Eurocentric Gender History

Anthony REID | Australian National University

11:30 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

12:00 – 13:00 LUNCH

13:00 – 14:30 PANEL 2 – APPLYING TO ASIA II

Chairperson Wei-Jun Jean YEUNG | National University of Singapore

13:00 Teaist Asia from the Prism of Two Hokkien Networks, 1912-1942

Huei-Ying KUO | Johns Hopkins University, USA

13:20 Grandparenting in Developing Southeast Asia: Comparative Perspectives from Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam

Bussarawan TEERAWICHITCHAINAN | Singapore Management University

13:40 The Included-outs: Theorizing Queer Life and Law from Asia

John Nguyet ERNI | Hong Kong Baptist University


14:30 – 15:00 TEA BREAK

15:00 – 16:30 PANEL 3 – RESEARCHING IN ASIA I

Chairperson Mike DOUGLASS | National University of Singapore

15:00 Asia as Method in Science Studies and Critical Humanities?

Warwick ANDERSON | University of Sydney, Australia

15:20 Community-Based Urban Development: A Research on Evolving Urban Paradigms in Singapore and Seoul

Im-sik CHO | National University of Singapore

15:40 Borders, Mobilities, and the Governance of Migrant Subjects: An Ethnographic Approach in Mobile Asia

ZHANG Juan | University of Queensland, Australia


16:30 END OF DAY 1

18:00 – 20:00 CONFERENCE DINNER (For Speakers, Chairpersons & Invited Guests)


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6 OCTOBER 2017 (FRIDAY) 09:15 – 09:30 REGISTRATION

09:30 – 11:00 PANEL 4 – RESEARCHING IN ASIA II

Chairperson HUANG Jianli | National University of Singapore

09:30 The ‘Asian Turn’ in Cultural Studies: From Internationalising Cultural Studies to Cultural Studies in Asia

Audrey YUE | National University of Singapore

09:50 Inter-Asian Concepts for Mobile Societies

Engseng HO | Duke University, USA & National University of Singapore

10:10 Religion and Development: Interactions and Reconfigurations as Viewed from Southeast Asia

R. Michael FEENER | Oxford University, UK


11:00 – 11:30 TEA BREAK

11:30 – 13:00 PANEL 5 – THEORISING FROM ASIA I

Chairperson CHUA Beng Huat | National University of Singapore

11:30 Thinking ‘Theory’ from Hong Kong: Between the Local and the Liminal

Meaghan MORRIS | University of Sydney, Australia

11:50 Myriad of Emotions: Narratives of Transnational Divorcees in Singapore

Sharon QUAH | University of Wollongong, Australia

12:10 Situating the Study of International Student Mobilities in Asia: Some Thoughts on Politics and Methodology

Ravinder SIDHU | The University of Queensland, Australia


13:00 – 14:00 LUNCH

14:00 – 15:30 PANEL 6 – THEORISING FROM ASIA II

Chairperson Gregory CLANCEY | National University of Singapore

14:00 Theorising Science, Technology, and Society (STS) from Asia

Michael M.J. FISCHER | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

14:20 Theorizing Family Systems, Marriage and Divorce in Asia

Gavin W. JONES | Australian National University

14:40 The Constructions of SSK/STS in UK (1970-90) and the Receptions and Reconsiderations of STS in East Asia (~1980-2000)

Daiwie FU | National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan


15:30 – 16:00 TEA BREAK

16:00 – 17:30 ROUNDTABLE

Chairperson Tommy KOH | Ambassador-At-Large at Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Anthony REID | Australian National University

WANG Gungwu | National University of Singapore

Brenda YEOH | National University of Singapore

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

17:30 – 18:00 CLOSING REMARKS

Jonathan RIGG | National University of Singapore

18:00 END OF CONFERENCE


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Nation and Religion in Asia

Peter VAN DER VEER Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany [email protected]

From the nineteenth-century onwards societies have taken the nation-form. The national state is a global phenomenon and Asia is not an exception. Asian societies are totally entangled with Western societies through the history of imperialism and of the cold war. Therefore one cannot find any ‘great divide’ between Euro-American and Asian societies in the transition to modernity. What one can, however, explore are the different pathways that these transformations take. This paper focuses on the differences in the ways Asian nation-states frame the location of religion- Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Daoism, and Christianity- in their societies. While the secular framing of religion is a central part of the formation of nation-states there are obviously great differences between the religious nationalism that characterizes South Asian societies and the radical atheism that characterizes communist societies like China and Vietnam. Comparisons between Asian societies de-essentialize the notion of ‘Asia’ and of ‘Asian exceptionalism’. It also allows one to move forward from the often implicit comparison with Euro-American societies. Peter van der Veer is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has worked extensively on religion and nationalism in India, China, and Europe. Among his many publications are Gods on Earth (LSE Monographs 1988), Religious Nationalism (University of California Press 1994), Imperial Encounters (Princeton University Press 2001), The Modern Spirit of Asia (Princeton University Press 2014), The Handbook of Religion and the Asian City (University of California Press 2015) and The Value of Comparison (Duke University Press 2016).


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Neither Here nor There? Chinese Urbanism at Crossroad?

Mee Kam NG The Chinese University of Hong Kong [email protected]

In face of climate change, global warming and increased socio-economic polarisation, the human race has searched for alternative urbanisms that are more ecological and humane. The re-opening of the Chinese economy about thirty years ago and the country’s adoption of administrative reforms and market mechanisms has led to miraculous economic growth. Unfortunately, the country has also followed the footsteps of the industrialised west in producing ecological disasters and socio-spatial injustice. While many cities have jumped on the bandwagon of eco-city developments, other scholars have argued for a return to ancient Chinese philosophies including Confucianism and Taoism to re-examine human beings’ rightful place in nature. These are no easy pathways. The former is often seen as another way of ‘marketing’ the city while the latter, philosophies of bygone agrarian eras, could be perceived as remotely relevant to a rapidly urbanising and globalising China. But are these arguments valid? Through case studies of Shenzhen (China’s first Special Economic Zone and now a pilot eco-city) and Xi’an (a capital of 13 dynasties in China and China’s important historic city), this paper examines the various forces at different geographical scales that have shaped developments in these two cities in the past three decades, placing their futures at a crossroad. The paper will evaluate the relevance of eco-city development concepts and ancient Chinese philosophical thoughts in guiding the future developments of these two cities. Mee Kam Ng is Vice-Chairman of the Department of Geography and Resource Management, the Director of the Urban Studies Programme, Associate Director of the Institute of Future Cities and the Hong Kong Institute of Asian Pacific Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute, a fellow of the Hong Kong Institute of Planners and an academic advisor of the Hong Kong Institute of Urban Design. She was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the United Kingdom in 2016. She has She has completed over 20 research projects and published widely on planning, governance and sustainability issues in Pacific Asia. Her publications have earned her six Hong Kong Institute of Planners’ Awards and the 2015 Association of European Schools of Planning Best Published Paper Award. She has been consultant to the United Nations and the European Union.


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The Perils of a Eurocentric Gender History

Anthony REID ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University [email protected]

Although it is hard to keep up with feminist history trends, there has clearly been a reaction against the domination of its earlier manifestations by an Anglophone European perspective. Yet we remain strangely trapped in a mind-set that sees Asian women held back by their ‘traditional’ cultures from full participation in modern aspirations for equality. What is this ‘traditional’ gender pattern? At least as far as Southeast Asia is concerned, I have been insisting for 30 years that pre-colonial Southeast Asian gender patterns were far more balanced than those of Europe, or indeed of other parts of Asia. Women were not dependent on men for their livelihoods, since their earning power was at least comparable to that of men, and this autonomy ensured that they were also equal players in sexual politics, using divorce as a ready escape from male misbehavior. Barbara Andaya and others have made this now seem almost orthodoxy. Patriarchy made its way into Southeast Asian values with high modernity, accepted by Asian male elites as an aspiration around the turn of the 20th century. The colonial agents of this modernity were exclusively male, and carried a model of progress through industrialization, rationality and sobre piety that was itself a product of the Industrial Revolution and its rapid urbanization. In both the newly urban lower middle classes appeared to seek both individual salvation and respectability in puritanical and patriarchal forms. This type of male, moralistic, puritan public piety lost its hold in Europe in the First World War, and was definitely buried in the 1960s, but really hit its stride in Southeast Asian cities during the rapid urbanization of the late 20th century. Although irresistible for western-educated Southeast Asian men, this model offered a very poor fit for women accustomed to dominant roles in business. Southeast Asians were therefore judged to have failed the test of modernizing economically in the colonial era. Patriarchy, individual piety and puritanism have indeed become very popular among Southeast Asia’s educated urbanites over the last half-century, but we should not blame ‘tradition’ for that.


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Teaist Asia from the Prism of Two Hokkien Networks, 1912-1942

Huei-Ying KUO Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University, USA [email protected]

This paper applies Philip McMichael’s concept “incorporated comparison” to examine the articulation between two networks of Chinese tea merchants—one based in British Singapore, and the other in Japanese Taipei—with the inter-Asian economy between 1912 and 1942. Merchants between the two networks shared the same Hokkien (southern Fujian) speech and native-place ties. Takeshi Hamashita points out that against the backdrop when China transformed from the tributary center of Asia to a republican state, overseas Chinese merchants continued to dominate the inter-regional trade. I argue that the momentum of East Asian regionalization initiated by overseas Chinese merchants was under challenge by both the Japanese imperialism and Chinese nationalism. In the 1910s, Japan employed the rhetoric of pan-Asianism to expand trade via Taiwan to Southeast Asia. This generated tension between the two Chinese business networks. From the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, the Singapore-based tea merchants sought support from the Chinese Nationalist Government to launch waves of anti-Japanese boycotts. The latter pushed Taiwanese merchants to develop the new markets in Manchuria. The divergent development between the two business networks points to the end of regionalization, at least a decade before the Japanese occupation of Singapore in February 1942. Huei-Ying Kuo is Senior Lecturer and Associate Research Scientist at the Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University. Born and raised in Taipei, she obtained BA and MA from National Taiwan University and Ph. D. from State University of New York at Binghamton. She was Assistant Professor of Asian history at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (2007-2011 Academic Years), postdoc fellow of Social Science Research Council’s Transregional Program (2012-2013), Short-Term Visiting Senior Research Fellow at ARI, NUS (2014), and recipient of William Dearborn Fellowship in American History (2016-2017). Her publication includes the monograph, Networks beyond Empires: Chinese Business and Nationalism in the Hong Kong-Singapore Corridor, 1914-1941, among others.


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Grandparenting in Developing Southeast Asia: Comparative Perspectives from Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam

Bussarawan TEERAWICHITCHAINAN School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University [email protected]

The extent, nature, and consequences of grandparenting are profoundly shaped by social contexts and how these contexts change over time. Few exceptions notwithstanding, comparative studies of grandparental care remain relatively sparse. Among the few existing studies, there is a tendency to focus on cultural factors, thus often dismissing the roles of economic development and demographic trends in explaining cross-country differences in grandparental care. To address these research gaps, this study analyzes recent representative surveys of older persons to examine the prevalence, correlates, and older persons’ perceptions about grandparental care in Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thailand. A combination of commonalities and differences especially in recent demographic histories and economic development levels that characterize these three Southeast Asian countries make them suitable for comparative analyses of grandparenting. Importantly, ongoing debates concerning how development impacts upon intergenerational relations add further interest to the cross-country comparisons. Findings suggest that in the case of Southeast Asia, differences in recent demographic trends and levels of development help account for differences in various aspects of grandparenting. Comparative studies of grandparenting will likely benefit by including these important aspects of the societal context in the conceptual frameworks guiding their research and paying explicit attention to them in their analyses. Bussarawan “Puk” Teerawichitchainan is Associate Professor of Sociology and Lee Kong Chian Fellow at the School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University. She is also affiliated with the Changing Family in Asia Cluster at the Asia Research Institute. She is currently a visiting scholar at Chulalongkorn University’s College of Population Studies. Her recent research addresses a variety of topics related to population aging, intergenerational relationships and the wellbeing of older persons in the context of Southeast Asia as well as from a comparative, cross-national perspective. Her ongoing research projects include a study that examines how cross-border migration affects Myanmar grandparents caring for grandchildren. Another project investigates the long-term impacts of war on health and the later life course of Vietnamese war survivors in northern Vietnam. Her research has been funded by various agencies including Singapore Ministry of Education, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).


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The Included-outs: Theorizing Queer Life and Law from Asia

John Nguyet ERNI Department of Humanities & Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University [email protected]

In this talk, my aim is to urge the formation of what can be called “legal cultural studies” to help us comprehend

the complex social and cultural role that critical legal consciousness and legal actions play to shape queer struggles. With the declaration of the Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, which was promulgated in Indonesia in 2006, how are new legal standards working to generate progressive human rights institutions on the one hand, and social movements on the other? Beyond this kind of normative legal thinking, how would the critical, post-foundational thinking of cultural studies conceive of new “spaces of action” by amalgamating queer theorizing with legal forms of intervention? I will use the debate over gay marriage laws and the struggle against penal code 377 to illustrate the historical and postcolonial legal possibilities - as well as impasses - for theorizing queer life from a trans-Asian vantage point. John Nguyet Erni is Fung Hon Chu Endowed Chair Professor of Humanics, and Head of the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. He was elected President of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities (2017-18). A former recipient of the Rockefeller and Annenberg research fellowships, and many other awards and grants, Erni’s wide-ranging work includes international and Asia-based cultural studies, human rights legal criticism, Chinese consumption of transnational culture, gender and sexuality in media culture, youth consumption culture in Hong Kong and Asia, and critical public health. He is the author or editor of 10 books, most recently Visuality, Emotions, and Minority Culture: Feeling Ethnic (2017, Springer); (In)visible Colors: Images of Non-Chinese in Hong Kong Cinema – A Filmography, 1970s – 2010s (with Louis Ho, Cinezin Press, 2016); Understanding South Asian Minorities in Hong Kong (with Lisa Leung, HKUP, 2014). Currently, he is completing a book project on the legal modernity of rights.


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Asia as Method in Science Studies and Critical Humanities?

Warwick ANDERSON University of Sydney, Australia [email protected]

During the past ten years, many scholars in the field of science and technology studies (STS)—some based in Asia and others not—have debated the possibility of East Asian “theory” in critical humanities. Some of us have linked this to arguments about “Asia as method” in cultural studies; some also have advocated bringing together postcolonial area studies and STS; others search for a specific Asian ontology or essence that might infuse STS—Asian values or an Orientalist strut, in effect. These are all efforts to make visible, or legible, an Asia that is good to think with, or from, rather than an Asia that is simply a data mine, or a place to which “universal” (often Euro-American) ideas diffuse and take root. These debates have raised questions about intellectual sovereignty and agency in Asia and the world in an era of “globalization.” They cause us to interrogate notions of universality and situated knowledge. In this talk I will review recent discussions of Asia as method in STS, and speculate on their relevance to how we might imagine distinctive and transformed East Asian medical humanities and environmental humanities. Warwick Anderson is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Department of History and the Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. His books include The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne 2002; Duke 2006); Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Duke 2006; Ateneo de Manila 2007); The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Johns Hopkins 2008); and written with Ian R. Mackay, Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity (Johns Hopkins, 2014). With Deborah Jenson and Richard C. Keller he edited Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (Duke 2011). He is an associate editor of Philippine Studies, and was a founding associate editor of the East Asian Science Technology and Society.


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Community-Based Urban Development: A Research on Evolving Urban Paradigms in Singapore and Seoul

Im Sik CHO Department of Architecture, School of Design & Environment, National University of Singapore [email protected]

This paper1 discusses a research that compares different approaches to urban development in Singapore and Seoul over the past decades, by focusing on community participation in the transformation of neighbourhoods and its impact on the built environment and communal life. Singapore and Seoul are known for their rapid economic growth and urbanisation under a strong control of developmental state in the past. However, both cities are at a critical crossroads where a new paradigmatic shift toward community engagement in participatory governance is emerging. This new urban paradigm reflects a gradual shift in the relationship between the state, market and civil society, spread over a span of fifty years, influencing and being influenced by the outcomes of urban development. The research employs multifaceted perspectives and multiscalar methods of inquiry in the investigation into the everyday consequences of community-based urban development on local neighbourhoods and communities. By applying a comparative and critical perspective to two of the most prominent cities in Asia today, this research reveals the social, economic and political complexities embedded in the evolving urban paradigms deriving from the varying socio-political conditions and drivers in each specific locality. Im Sik Cho is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture, School of Design and Environment, at the National University of Singapore where she serves as the leader for urban studies research and teaching and as principal investigator for many research projects, related to urban space planning for sustainable high-density environments and design for social sustainability involving community-based, participatory approaches. Her research interests address the challenges and opportunities that Asian cities face with accelerating social change, especially in the context of neighbourhood planning, focusing on the social dimension of sustainable development. Her recent publications as lead author include Re-framing Urban Space: Urban Design for Emerging Hybrid and High-Density Conditions (2016, Routledge), Community-based Urban Development: Evolving Urban Paradigms in Singapore and Seoul (2017, Springer), and Changing approaches to community participation for social sustainability: Neighbourhood planning in Singapore and Seoul in Caprotti and Yu (eds), Sustainable Cities in Asia (forthcoming, Routledge).

1 This paper is based on the book: Cho, Im Sik, and Blaz Križnik (2017). Community-Based Urban Development: Evolving Urban

Paradigms in Singapore and Seoul. Singapore: Springer.


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Borders, Mobilities, and the Governance of Migrant Subjects: An Ethnographic Approach in Mobile Asia

Juan ZHANG School of Social Science, the University of Queensland, Australia.

This paper contributes to the discussion on how we research in Asia, when diverse Asian societies are becoming increasingly mobile and connected by the circulation of individuals, commodities, capital, technologies, ideas and imaginations. An ethnographic approach with a particular focus on borders, mobilities and governance can contribute to a deeper understanding of what it means to be mobile/immobile in Asia. Borders, mobilities and governance constitute three key aspects that inform the larger theoretical debate on citizenship, marginalisation, human agency, and governmentality. Borders (physical and symbolic) illustrate the highly political processes of inclusion and exclusion; they also normalise and moralise multiple conditions of marginalisation and exploitation. Mobilities show how the contemporary risk regime operates through the control of movement, usually via policy mechanisms of making move and letting stop. Governance brings to light the making of migrant subjects and mobile citizens, and the powerful ways in which governing operates through subjects (Miller & Rose 1990). Using examples of cross-border petty trade at the China-Vietnam borderland, marriage migration in Singapore, and casino work in Singapore and Macau, this paper addresses the multiplication of borders and its deep implication on citizenship, immigration, and transnational labour. In the context of inter-connected Asia, mobile individuals become flexible subjects of governance in the global regime of production and consumption. Juan Zhang is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Social Science, the University of Queensland. Prior to UQ, she was a Lecture in Sociology at the University of New England, and a Research Fellow at ARI, NUS. Her research interests include transnational mobilities, borders, labour migration, and casinos in Asia. She has published in journals including, Current Sociology, Environment & Planning D, Environment & Planning A, Gender Place & Culture, among others. Her recent co-edited book is entitled The Art of Neighbouring: Making Relations Across China's Borders (University of Amsterdam Press, 2017). This book presented the different ways in which marginalized communities at national borders deploy the “art of neighbouring” and build new forms of solidarity and collaboration (see e-book). Since 2012, she has been working on casino-led labour mobility in Southeast Asia. Juan serves the editorial board of the journal Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration.

http://www.oapen.org/download?type=document&docid=621899


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The ‘Asian Turn’ in Cultural Studies: From Internationalising Cultural Studies to Cultural Studies in Asia

Audrey YUE Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore [email protected]

The last decade has seen the emergence of cultural studies in Asia. It has also seen ‘Asia’ become a prominent research object and subject in cultural studies. This paper examines some key issues in the relationship between ‘Cultural Studies’ and ‘Asia’. It explores the internationalisation of cultural studies, and the problems in bringing Anglophone cultural studies to Asia. It asks, why, for example, are theories of race and ethnicity, which are central to the approach of the Birmingham School and Stuart Hall, difficult to translate to Asia, with its diversities of histories and contexts. It also critically traces the shift in the study of Asia from ‘area’ to ‘theory’ and ‘method’ by considering the confluence between cultural studies and Asian studies, and the development of new models of Asian cultural studies, such as the institutionalisation of inter-Asian cultural studies and the development of cultural studies in Asia. Using case studies from ARI’s ‘cultural studies in Asia’ research cluster, this paper draws out key approaches to showcase how cultural research can be conducted from within Asia. Using further examples from queer Singapore studies, this paper develops a method for Asian cultural research that attends to the specificities of sites and practices, as well as the geopolitics of knowledge production. Audrey Yue is Professor of Media, Culture and Critical Theory in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Before returning to Singapore (where she was born and schooled), and joining NUS in 2017, she lived in Australia for 30 years, and was Professor in Cultural Studies and Director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures at the University of Melbourne. She researches in the fields of Sinophone media cultures, cultural policy and development, and queer Asian studies. She is author and editor of more than 7 scholarly books and 80 refereed journal articles and research book chapters, including Sinophone Cinemas (2014); Transnational Australian Cinema (2013); Queer Singapore (2012) and Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile (2010). She has received more than SGD$4.2m in competitive grants from the Australian Research Council, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Hong Kong Research Council, and has supervised 20 PhD theses to completion as Principle Supervisor.


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Inter-Asian Concepts for Mobile Societies

Engseng HO History Department, Duke University, USA Asia Research Institute & Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore [email protected]

While globalization has stimulated scholarship beyond local and national units of space, its ability to do so has reached the limits of a modern timeframe. To go beyond those limits, I propose that the study of Asia, thought of as an inter-Asian space, and smaller than the whole globe, can provide tractable concepts for a new round of research to shed light on the social shapes of societies that are mobile, spatially expansive, and interactive with one other. To promote an adjective to a noun, inter-Asia, an old world criss-crossed by interactions between parts that have known and recognized one another for centuries, provides an unmatched depth and breadth of mobile experience and material. Such material can be recognized and mobilized as data for scholarship if seen through concepts designed to bring out the shapes of mobile societies, and to analyze the dynamics that form and transform them. In this sense, the notion that area studies receive theories and concepts but cannot generate them need not be true. Engseng Ho is Professor of Anthropology and Professor of History at Duke University, USA. He is currently the Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Visiting Professor in Arabia Asia Studies at the Asia Research Institute, and the Director of Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore. He was previously Professor of Anthropology at Harvard and Senior Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He is a specialist on Arab/Muslim diasporas across the Indian Ocean, and their relations with western empires, past and present. His writings include The Graves of Tarim, Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, and Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat, Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (2), 2004.


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Religion and Development: Interactions and Reconfigurations as Viewed from Southeast Asia

R. Michael FEENER Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, University of Oxford, UK [email protected]

Religion has been profoundly reconfigured over the past half-century, with broad transformations in the understandings and experiences of ‘religion’ across diverse confessional traditions in many parts of the world. This paper presents critical analysis of the ongoing, mutually transformative interactions of religious ideas and institutions with the sphere of ‘development’ as seen from particular vantage points in Southeast Asia. This is pursued through case studies from the trans-regional traditions of Buddhism and Islam - with particular attention to new forms of socially engaged practice among ‘development monks’ and lay Buddhist organizations in Thailand, and the implementation of Islamic law within dramatic contexts of interventionist reconstruction in post-conflict/post-disaster Aceh, Indonesia. Both of these cases reveal marked commitments to the establishment of a new, reformed social order. Over the course of these projects, the very idea of religion has come to be re-thought by diverse parties who draw selectively on and dynamically interpret canonical texts and traditions as they engage with a host of other ideas and influences that manifest themselves through contemporary humanitarian and development encounters. These two case studies of entanglements highlight specific ways in which ‘religion’ and ‘development’ interact and mutually inform each other. The broader analysis in which these particular cases or treated, moreover, also reflects the findings of a larger body of work produced by ARI’s ‘Religion and Globalisation Cluster’ over recent years. Our work has sought to provide both more robust empirical data and critical conceptual analysis for understanding the implications of contemporary entanglements across diverse discourses and experiences of religion and development - in ways that reveal the importance of rethinking such vital terms from within contemporary Asia. R. Michael FEENER is the Sultan of Oman Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, and Islamic Centre Lecturer in the History Faculty at the University of Oxford. He was formerly Research Leader of the Religion and Globalisation Research Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, and Associate Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. He has also taught at Reed College and the University of California, Riverside, and held visiting professor positions and research fellowships at Harvard, Kyoto University, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the University of Copenhagen, The Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art (Honolulu), and the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden, the Netherlands. He has published extensively in the fields of Islamic studies and Southeast Asian history, as well as on post-disaster reconstruction, religion and development.


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Thinking ‘Theory’ from Hong Kong: Between the Local and the Liminal

Meaghan MORRIS Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, Australia [email protected]

When the project that became Inter-Asia Cultural Studies was launched at the first Trajectories conference in Taipei in July 1992, Chen Kuan-Hsing’s conception of “internationalist localism” oriented our work towards a mode of knowledge production that aimed to generate new concepts and socio-historical frameworks of analysis by fostering engagement between scholars actively inhabiting locales across the region but trained in ignorance of each other’s contexts. Marking in this way a decisive difference from an expertise-based “area” studies, the Inter-Asia thought experiment has now thrived for a quarter of a century, building institutions as well as collegial networks. During this time the worldly context for our project has changed: where once we joined in critical rejection of the Western metropolitan norms of academic practice in which we had been trained, today we speculate on a future dominated by China in as yet unforeseeable ways. Maintaining that commitment to an outward-looking mode of locale-based thought, my paper argues that Hong Kong’s fraught situation as part of the PRC today illuminates dilemmas and issues now emerging but perhaps less lucidly experienced elsewhere, providing a new basis for the internationalism that is intrinsic to the Inter-Asia project. Touching on some revisions in political theory of the anthropological concept of liminality that envisage a life “stuck” on a threshold between a turbulent present and imagined futures that are furiously contested, I will suggest that while the uprising of the Hong Kong ‘Umbrella Movement’ in November-December 2014 had distinctive features it articulated possibilities of imaginative action for the conditions in which masses of people in many parts of the world now live. Meaghan Morris is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, and former Chair Professor of Cultural Studies in Lingnan University, Hong Kong (2000-2012). She has acted as Chair for both the international Association for Cultural Studies (2004-2008) and the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society (2012-15), and is a Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Her books include The Pirate's Fiancée: feminism, reading, postmodernism (1988), Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture (1998), Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture (2006), and Creativity and Academic Activism: Instituting Cultural Studies co-edited with Mette Hjort (2012).


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Myriad of Emotions: Narratives of Transnational Divorcees in Singapore

Sharon Ee Ling QUAH School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong, Australia [email protected]

Joining existing scholarly literature on uncoupling trajectories, family practices, emotion work of divorced couples and families, the study examines the emotional experiences and emotion work of a specific group of divorced families - transnational divorced families. While there has been substantive research done on divorced and transnational families, transnational divorced families remain understudied. In addition, this evidence-based research on experiences of transnational divorced families in Singapore responds to calls by scholars to theorise personal relationships and family transformations from Asia, and contribute to global understanding of family lives and arrangements so as to ‘theorise universal concerns more fully’ (Mohanty 2003). Drawing from qualitative data collected through in-depth interviews with 50 transnational divorcees in Singapore, the article discusses the emotion work involved and emotions experienced as transnational divorcees deal with ongoing negotiation with ex-spouse, work out co-parenting arrangements, reconfigure family practices, and navigate local and international systems within the transnational spaces they occupy. The paper adopts an intersectional approach to examine how the nationality, class position and gender identity of transnational divorcees shape transnational divorcees' emotion work and emotional experiences. The findings reveal the spectrum, complexity and intensity of emotions ranging from guilt, sympathy, helplessness, entrapment, indignation, alienation, relief, triumph and hope experienced by transnational divorcees and argues that their emotion work and emotional experiences are far from being straightforward and easily accountable, but in some instances, conflicting and counter-intuitive. Sharon Ee Ling Quah is a Lecturer in Sociology with the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong. After completing her PhD in Sociology with The University of Sydney in 2013, Sharon was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship (2013-2014) and a subsequent research fellowship (2015-2016) by National University of Singapore, Asia Research Institute. During her fellowship, she published her first sole-authored book, 'Perspectives on Marital Dissolution: Divorce Biographies in Singapore' (Springer, 2015). She has also recently completed an exploratory study on transnational divorces in Singapore as the Principal Investigator with a research grant awarded by the Singapore Government. Her research interests include non-normative families, divorce, transnational divorce and intimacies, migration, transnationalism, genders, feminist perspectives, masculinities, sexualities and social policy.


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Situating the Study of International Student Mobilities in Asia: Some Thoughts on Politics and Methodology

Ravinder SIDHU School of Education, University of Queensland, Australia [email protected]

This paper is an account of a sustained period of interdisciplinary engagement with scholars located in Asia and the possibilities opened up for critical, creative, reflexive scholarship. Using a number of collaborative research projects with scholars from the Asia Research Institute (ARI) as my reference points, I call on ‘theory’ and embodied history to explore the politics of international student mobility. I reflect on the shape and form taken by my research and writing in a gateway ‘global city’ which orders bodies into sharply defined hierarchies of talent, skill and value. In this setting, the textured lives of student migrants are instructive of the myriad ways in which they can exceed the singular identities ascribed to them by states seeking high quality human capital. More than embodiments of human capital, student trajectories reveal heterogeneous desires and contingent life projects. Doing research in Asia is also an opportunity to interrogate the particularities and limits of Anglophone scholarship. There are opportunities to follow formal and vernacular histories of migration, and to excavate the ‘silent residues of colonial practices’ that differentiate ‘good’ circulations from ‘dangerous’ flows of people and ideas. It is in specialist centres like ARI that new questions can be posed, new methods developed and trialled, and different ways of theorising explored. For example, are there connecting threads between the colonial rationalities which shaped population movements in Southeast Asia and contemporary international student flows? Can this help us to understand the mobile world in an ‘age of disruption’? Ravinder Sidhu works at the School of Education, University of Queensland (Australia). Her research has focused on the cultural politics of higher education and schooling for mobile populations such as migrants and refugees. She is the author of Universities and Globalization: To market, to market (Mahwah: NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). Ravinder was born in Singapore, and educated in Malaysia and Australia. Current research projects include an investigation of teacher activism in comparative and cross cultural contexts and the gendering of skilled mobilities.


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Theorising Science, Technology, and Society (STS) from Asia

Michael M.J. FISCHER Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA [email protected]

Anthropological STS in Asia is, in effect, “Theory from the Global East” that has fast come to challenge, supplement, and rearrange theory from the Global North (traditional STS), “theory from the Global South” or South Africa (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012), postcolonial theory or subaltern studies from India (Guha and Spivak, ed. 1993), or white settler postcolonial theory from the antipodes (W. Anderson 2002, 2012). Among the global imaginaries of our late industrial worlds are those crystallized in Asian experiences and rendered in Asian contemporary arts. Much of the future imaginary even in Western writing is located in Asia (e.g., W. Gibson’s 1984 Neuromancer on immersive cyberworlds to Ramiz Naam’s 2012 Nexus thriller on psychotropic expansions and national security state global war). I’ve become particularly interested in such writing from Asian points of view by technoscientifically literate authors. But, while expanding the purview of ethnographic registers with Asian literatures, that also explore current disasters from pandemics to intensifying earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, and industrial disasters such as the Fukushima melt down, and rising sea levels — I remain dedicated to the hard work of empirical ethnography, geography, and social history and juxtapose this work with those of the science fiction writers working the same terrain (and often themselves scientists and physicians with strong empirical bents). Michael M.J. Fischer teaches at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His essays on Singapore include: “Biopolis: Asian Science in the Global Circuitry”, “Teaching under the Tembusu Tree,” “Anthropological STS in Asia,” “A Tale of Two Genome Institutes: Qualitative Networks, Charismatic Voice, and R&D strategies – Juxtaposing GIS Biopolis and BGI,” “The BAC Consultation on Neuroscience and Ethics, an Anthropologist’s Perspective”, “The Asian Molecular Biology Revolution" (review essay), “Ethnography for Aging Societies: Dignity, Cultural Genres and Singapore’s Imagined Futures”, and “Sea State: Charles Lim’s Video- and Photo-graphic Eye: Seeing Singapore (Again) from the Sea.” He has been an Asia Research Institute (ARI) fellow, the inaugural Ngee Ann Kongsi Visiting Professor at Tembusu College at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and is a Principal Investigator at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). He is the author of four books on Iran, and four on anthropological methods and social theory, including the forthcoming Anthropology in the Meantime.


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Theorizing Family Systems, Marriage and Divorce in Asia Gavin W. JONES Australian National University [email protected]

Theory on family systems, marriage and divorce in non-Asian settings is certainly not irrelevant to developing appropriate theoretical constructs for Asian settings. The issue is more that few Western theorists have paid much attention to Asian settings. Those who have done so on a sustained basis, with long periods of residence in the region (for example, Caldwell, Dyson, Hirschman, Knodel, Greenhalgh) have contributed greatly to our understanding of these matters. Lack of data has hindered the factual basis of trends on which theory can be properly developed. But sometimes it is more conceptual clarity that is lacking. My presentation will elaborate on the interaction between data and conceptual constructs that sometimes need modification in Asian settings, particularly in relation to understanding three aspects of family and marriage which I have researched: (1) the “flight from marriage”; (2) factors influencing the marriage market for well educated women, and (3) divorce trends in Malay-Muslim societies of Southeast Asia. Gavin Jones is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University (ANU). After 11 years with the National University of Singapore (NUS), mainly in the Asia Research Institute, he retired in December 2014 as Director of the NUS’s JY Pillay Comparative Asia Research Centre. His PhD was awarded at ANU in 1966, and his early career was with the Population Council in New York, Thailand and Indonesia. He was then with the Demography and Sociology Program at the ANU for 28 years, serving as head of program for an eight-year period. Professor Jones has conducted research on varied subjects in the field of demography and human resource development, in recent years focusing especially on low fertility regimes in Asia, delayed and non-marriage, urbanization issues, equity aspects of educational development and the demography of ageing. He has served as consultant to many international agencies. Professor Jones has published about 30 books and monographs and some 170 refereed journal articles and book chapters.


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The Constructions of SSK/STS in UK (1970-90) and the Receptions and Reconsiderations of STS in East Asia (~1980-2000) Daiwie FU

National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan [email protected]

I'm finishing a book project on the historical construction of SSK in UK, especially in its first 20 years including its relationship with Kuhn. In order to "theorising from/in Asia about STS", I think the first step to do that is to "historicising and contingentizing" those STS theories developed from Europe and America. Meanwhile, when western STS theories were introduced into East Asian, their temporal sequences of introductions and characterizations would naturally be quite different from those in the West, plus the factor of rather different social environments in East Asian societies like Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan. Thus we have two important elements here: historical contingencies of STS in the west, and the differences of receiving and reconsidering STS theories from the west into East Asia. With these two elements, I think they would help us in approaching the goal of theorising STS from/in Asia. Daiwie Fu, PhD from Columbia University, distinguished professor in National Yang-Ming University of Taiwan, doing researches in history and philosophy of science, history of Chinese science, gendered history of medicine in modern Taiwan, STS and controversies studies, and most recent project: The historical construction of SSK in UK from 1970s: An East Asian Perspective.


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ABOUT THE ROUNDTABLE SPEAKERS Anthony REID is Professor Emeritus at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He has taught and researched Southeast Asian history for 50 years, in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Australia and the United States. He was Founding Director of the Asia Research Institute in Singapore. He has authored or edited numerous books on aspects of Southeast Asian history from the 14th to the 21st centuries, including explorations on slavery, freedom, Islam, gender, the Chinese minority and its Jewish analogy, population, and economic history. Tommy KOH is Ambassador-At-Large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Chairman of the Governing Board of the Centre for International Law and Rector of Tembusu College at the National University of Singapore. He is the Co-Chairman of the China-Singapore Forum, the India-Singapore Strategic Dialogue and the Japan-Singapore Symposium. He was Singapore’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York for 13 years. He was Ambassador to the United States of America for 6 years. He was the Dean of the Faculty of Law of NUS. He was also the President of the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea. He chaired the Preparatory Committee for and the Main Committee at the Earth Summit. He had served as the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy to Russia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. He was also Singapore’s Chief Negotiator for the USA-Singapore Free Trade Agreement. He has chaired two dispute panels for the WTO. In 1984, Yale University conferred on him an honorary degree of doctor of law. Prof Koh received the Elizabeth Haub Prize for Environmental Law in 1996 and was made a Champion of the Earth by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2006. He also received the Great Negotiator Award 2014 from Harvard University on 10 April 2014. He is also Chairman of ARI’s International Advisory Board.

Brenda S.A. YEOH is Professor (Provost’s Chair) in the Department of Geography as well as Research Leader of the Asian Migration Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her research interests include the politics of space in colonial and postcolonial cities, and she has considerable experience working on a wide range of migration research in Asia, including key themes such as cosmopolitanism and highly skilled talent migration; gender, social reproduction and care migration; migration, national identity and citizenship issues; globalising universities and international student mobilities; and cultural politics, family dynamics and international marriage migrants. She has published widely in these fields. Her latest book titles include The Cultural Politics of Talent Migration in East Asia (Routledge, 2012, with Shirlena Huang); and Migration and Diversity in Asian Contexts (ISEAS press, 2012, with Lai Ah Eng and Francis Collins); Return: Nationalizing Transnational Mobility in Asia (Duke University Press, 2013, with Xiang Biao and Mika Toyota); as well as a paperback reprint of her book Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment (originally published in 1996 by Oxford University Press; reprinted by NUS Press in 2003 and 2013).

Documents

AN ASIAN TURN? - Home - ARI · 14:00 Theorising Science, Technology, and Society ... years that pre-colonial Southeast Asian gender patterns were far more balanced than those of