1 Area studies since 1989 and 2001

"Area studies is dead! Long live area studies!" These words describe the field in the early 21st century. In the 1990s, close studies of individual cultures and societies appeared to be of lessening significance in an era of globalization ¹ . The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites reduced the commitment of US funding bodies to programs, which were intended in part to equip the US to understand potential adversaries and sites of conflict.

In fact, area studies is alive and well within the globalization literature but reconfigured around 1) regions and 2) issues of global and national significance that play out within the region.

1) The intellectual community requires, Arjun Appadurai argues, a new architecture of area studies to see how the world looks from other (i.e., non-American) locations. His example is the Asia Pacific - Australia’s own region and the subject of this Network. ²

Major research centres around the world, such as the Globalisation and Regionalisation Centre at Warwick University in the UK, have adopted this broader and more analytical approach to understanding our world. Scholars from the Centre consider the Asia Pacific as a "laboratory" for region building because it is more diverse, dynamic and fragmented than the "other two regional pillars of the contemporary global order" ³

Australian national interest requires a Research Network that embraces the increasing interdependence within the region, whilst noting that states still jealously guard their sovereignty. Examples include the US and Singaporean shift to bilateral FTAs, China’s claim to Taiwan, North Korea's nuclear threats and Indonesia's response to national fragmentation and to religious fundamentalism. Hence, country expertise is an element of the new area studies architecture.

2) Researchers and funding agencies such as the Ford Foundation (see below) now realise that such regional issues have global significance and necessitate revitalised area studies approaches from governments, societies and research communities . Regional issues - whether increased tourism and trade or pandemics and terrorism - are multidimensional, multidirectional and multidisciplinary. They cross geographic and disciplinary boundaries. The proposed Asia- Pacific Research Network co-ordinates researchers who combine multiple levels of analysis (global, regional, national and local), multiple languages and multiple disciplines (from security to trade). The Network is therefore a rich and accessible resource for government, industry and the wider community Such a Network is fundamental to Australia’s knowledge economy in a new millennium.

In an era of smaller-worldness, globalization and English-language dominance, the need to spend years learning languages and studying specific cultures and histories was questioned. Funding in US institutions contracted, programs were closed and faculty and student numbers in these areas declined. This process was repeated in most English-speaking countries.

Intellectually, too, "area studies," as it had arisen in the US from the late 1950s, was questioned. Its association with the Cold War was obvious, and its British roots lay in imperial administration, embodied in remarks such as "every successful colonial District Officer had an anthropologist’s diploma in his knapsack." Postcolonial analysis saw "area studies" as part of a mechanism of power and control.

In the wake of September 11, and with experience of globalization’s challenges, many voices bemoan the decline of specialists. One commentator wrote:

We need a return to the pre-eminence of the area specialist ... What is needed is the officer who spends his whole life studying Egypt, or the Arabian peninsula, or South Asia. Only those types have the local knowledge and contacts. ⁴

In a globalized world, the need for language ability and for fine-honed understanding of different places is not limited to matters of security. A recent study of advertising in India - an example itself of something one might call "new area studies" - noted the interplay between global advertising forms and campaigns and the subtleties of Indian cultures. ⁵ The increasing involvement of ever-larger numbers of different people with each other - globalization - appears to require more, not fewer, cultural skills and historical awareness. The techniques of "area studies" have gained renewed value.

In the US, the Ford Foundation recognized this fact well before September 11. In the 1997-8 academic year, it began a program called "Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies," which committed US $25 million over six years. The aims were

to enhance in-depth study of particular areas, and to activate new, visible and significant streams of funding; [and] to foster innovative approaches to the field’s intellectual foundations and practices in light of a dramatically changed and increasingly interconnected world.

In the first year, the program dispersed 30 grants of $50,000 each to projects, which tackled a wide range of problems and involved institutions "from Maine to Hawai’i." ⁶

The Ford program recognized that the methods and practices of the old area studies, though having many merits, were insufficient by themselves to tackle the complexities of a changed world. The constant interactions of the 21st century were simply not a part of the world in which the old area studies grew. The task today lies in using the strengths of area studies and to cope better with the challenges of today’s reshaped, remorselessly communicating world.

Internationally, some of the most interesting, recent scholarship stems from projects that draw heavily on area studies skills and specialties but use them to tackle problems that are very much part of a globalized world and also employ methods of "new" disciplines. Arvind Rajagopal’s Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge University Press, 2001), which won the Association for Asian Studies prize for the best book on South Asia published in 2001, uses multi-lingual sources and a close knowledge of north Indian politics to try to understand the rise of Hindu-based, religious-majoritarian politics - after television arrives in India in 1982. The book draws on techniques of media analysis and wrestles with questions posed by the globalization of media since the 1990s. Examples of such scholarship are growing, and such work goes on in Australia, as the next section of this website on Australian research capacity illustrates.

2 International developments in area-studies project funding

The past decade has seen an increasing interest in crossing disciplinary and regional boundaries in humanities and social sciences research. Asian-area studies is no exception. Some of the implications and challenges of these developments for area studies research were canvassed in a report for the Ford Foundation, Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies in 1999. ⁷

No agency in the governmental or private sector has played a more influential role in the development of Area Studies research and research training (including Asian-area research) than the Ford Foundation. From the early 1950s to the mid-1960s the Foundation’s International Training and Research Program invested over $270 million in research-training and building research "centres of excellence" at US universities.  From 1999 to 2003 it awarded an additional $25 million toward projects that aimed to "revitalize Area Studies" by crossing disciplinary, regional, and theoretical boundaries. Some of the projects funded under the Crossing Borders program are listed below to illustrate important international directions in Asia-area research collaboration and project funding and over the past five years.

3 Projects funded with "Crossing Borders" grants

Projects were funded under five categories:

·        Reconceptualizations of "Area"

·        Borders and Diasporas

·        Border-Crossing Seminars and Workshops

·        Curricular Transformation and Integration

·        Collaborations with Nongovernmental Organizations, Activists, and the Media

·        Rethinking Specific Areas

Institutions and projects funded include:

The University of Hawai’i at Manoa

The University of Hawai’i’s "Moving Cultures: Remaking Asia-Pacific Studies" project focuses on the tiny Pacific island nation of Palau, whose population of 17,000 hosts approximately 5,000 Filipino contract workers and 44,000 tourists a year from Japan and Taiwan. The study of Palau can shed light on economic and cultural relations across Asia and the Pacific, and on the place of tourism and migratory labor in local, regional, and global economies and culture.

University of Iowa

The UI project explores historical and contemporary interconnections across the Indian Ocean,. The University is developing a set of interrelated activities involving the study of linguistic and geographic areas where cultural and social processes mingle or overlap.

University of Virginia

The Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia is working on a "Crossing Borders" initiative to lay the foundation for a revitalized graduate training program focused on the Pacific Rim. By ethnographically exploring processes of transnationalism and globalization, and looking beyond static geographical definitions of region and place, the initiative seeks to develop a more integrated model for understanding cultural tradition and exchange.

California State University, Dominguez Hills

As one of several grantees in the "Crossing Borders" initiative that are exploring the intersection of area studies and ethnic studies, California State University, Dominguez Hills is focusing on the interaction between the non-Western cultures found in Southern California and their original homelands.

California State University, Los Angeles

The project aims to reconceptualize an existing Asian studies program at California State University, Los Angeles by focusing on the intersections among Asian studies, Asian-American studies, and Latin American/Chicano studies. It challenges the artificial borders delineating area and ethnic studies and contributes to a fundamental rethinking of both.

St. Lawrence University

A "Crossing Borders" grant is helping St. Lawrence University to integrate its area studies and intercultural initiatives into a new, more theoretically informed curricular model. A concern for diasporas will place traditional geographical "areas" such as Africa,  Asia, Canada, the Caribbean, and Europe in conversation with cultural groups living in the United States.

University of California, Berkeley

Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies is convening a series of events to explore "the various meanings of globalization," and the implications of globalization for theory and method in graduate training and research.

Emory University

Emory University’s Center for International Studies has formed two interdisciplinary working groups, "Comparative Industrialization" and "Comparing Postcolonial Culture," to examine specific research topics that are international and comparative in scope.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The University of Illinois is implementing a campus-wide program, "Area Studies, Identity, and the Arts," designed to examine how identities are formed and reproduced, and how diverse identities relate to each other under conditions of growing global interdependence.

University of Michigan

Through a "Crossing Borders" grant aimed at fostering activities that cross traditional area and disciplinary boundaries, the University of Michigan’s International Institute is conducting three linked thematic projects - "Privacies and Power," "Citizenship and Empire," and "Violence: Ethics, Politics, Texts, Cultures, and Discourses." These projects connect area studies scholarship with the arts, the professions, and the sciences, as well as with activities beyond the academy.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

As part of an ongoing restructuring of its area studies program, the University of Nebraska is using its "Crossing Borders" grant to support a set of curricular and research initiatives that explore the connection between human rights and human diversity in comparative international perspective. Attention will focus on the experiences of social minorities, whose subordinate relation to the majority population - whether determined by race, religion, gender, language, ethnicity, or other criteria - places them at risk of various forms of discrimination and persecution.

University of Pennsylvania

In two projects, the University of Pennsylvania’s "Crossing Borders" initiative is examining boundaries themselves as zones of tension in global circulation processes.

University of Washington

The Taylor Institute at the University of Washington has established four faculty program committees charged with integrating the university’s strengths in area studies with its diverse array of departments and professional schools. The Institute’s goal is to develop a forum for generating innovative, campus-wide instructional programs and research projects that cross disciplinary and area studies boundaries: "Global Designs and Local Implementations: Law, State, and Society"; "Transnational and Transregional Migrations and the Politics of Identity and Culture’, "Local Economies in an Age of Global Capitalism"; and "Women and Democratization."

University of Wisconsin-Madison

The International Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has instituted a series of pilot projects to create new forms of area knowledge that cross traditional regional and disciplinary borders. These pilot projects, developed this year as Research Circles, are designed to draw upon a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, involve multiple world regions, and address local and global concerns. Each Circle links Madison faculty and advanced graduate students active in various area studies programs with groups of scholars around the world working on similar issues.

Yale University

Three cross-area, interdisciplinary, student-faculty working groups were formed at Yale, each seeking new ways to problematize, investigate, and theorize rapidly changing interactions between the global and the local as well as the shifting locations and processes through which these interactions take place. For all three, the "region" emerged as a flexible, conceptual site that enables one to compare historically distinct responses to processes of global reconfiguration, to characterize and specify transborder flows, connections, and communities, and to explore what these processes imply for the study of themes such as modernity, migration, and linguistic identity within a revitalized area studies.

Oberlin College

Moving beyond traditional geographic and disciplinary boundaries, Oberlin College’s "Crossing Borders" grant is being used to develop a "Transcultural Area Studies Project." Building on Oberlin’s rich area studies, language, and study-abroad programs, the project’s main goal is to explore connections that occur across cultures, countries,world regions, and fields of study.

Hamline University

Exploring an unusual scholarly collaboration that transcends conventional academic boundaries, Hamline University in Minnesota has entered into partnership with KTCA-TV Public Television and the Star Tribune newspaper of the Twin Cities in order to expand the discourse and the audience for area studies. The Public Television International Collaborative, drawing on the resources of one of the nation’s most watched public television affiliates and the upper Midwest’s largest-circulation daily newspaper, has two main goals: to connect substantive area studies and language skills to a comparative thematic framework, and to connect academic area studies with the media through public journalism.

Northern Arizona University

Conducting an innovative scholarly collaboration that transcends conventional academic boundaries, Northern Arizona University is using its "Crossing Borders" grant to develop a consortium for exchanges among scholars of indigenous studies in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand.

New York University

Investigating how one traditionally defined region may be reconceptualized, the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies of New York University (NYU) is using its "Crossing Borders" grant to develop a demonstration model for renewing the field of Middle Eastern studies. The project’s broad goal is to question the conventional boundaries of the region, which are constantly subject to change under the pressure of political and cultural transformation, as well as interstate conflicts. In addition, NYU hopes to displace the tendency to study the Middle East primarily in relation to the West, to bring about collaborations between scholars in the humanities and the social sciences, to bring in specialists on other areas for comparative perspective, and to connect with a broader public.

4 "Crossing Borders" grant reports

Some of the funded projects adopted problem-centred approaches to research collaboration and research training. Emory University received a grant of $106,200 under the Ford Foundation’s Crossing Borders program to support advanced training and research in comparative and area studies ­­programs dealing with specific regions of the world. "This problem-centered focus will encourage fresh approaches to area studies and provide faculty and students with state-of-the-art research overviews," Director Ivan Karp was reported to have explained at the time. "Many of the intellectual tools that international and area studies specialists used in the Cold War era now seem inadequate to the task of understanding the sudden changes many regions of the world have experienced," Karp continued. "The methods of any one discipline and the historical experience of any one region can provide only part of the analytical framework needed to understand new structures and relationships." A key part of the Emory program was the participation of researchers from the region to participate in Foundation-funded research. ⁸

Other funded research programs were designed to bring different regional specialists together for trans-national and comparative research projects. At the University of Iowa, for example, researchers in South Asian Studies and in African Studies collaborated in a Ford-funded project to erase boundaries separating regional specializations within "area studies."

Mary Geraghty reported in the UI newsletter that the associate provost and dean of International Programs at UI, Michael McNulty, understood that the program was part of an effort to help area studies scholars begin to broaden their research and intellectual interests. "We will continue to have grounded study in one area, McNulty says, "but scholars need to know how other areas impinge on that... This grant will help us bring together faculty and student for research that is both cross-national and interdisciplinary." ⁹

Other Ford-funded projects supported network-building among Asia-area specialists in the US and abroad. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Ford Foundation grant was used to support development of "research circles... to extend and sustain global networks of faculty and advanced students and embed their research and teaching activities in area studies instruction on the UW campus." Ford funds also supported the development of two Global Learning Communities "each of which [featured] comparative study of local issues in global context; collaborative learning in a network of scholars from around the world; innovative training for a new generation of scholars; and new courses and better teaching methods for all students."  On this model, UW faculty conducted "collaborative research with peers in other countries" while postgraduate research students studied "with leading scholars from the countries they work on."

The UW project began with a series of pilot projects "which developed into research circles, drew upon a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, involved multiple world regions, and addressed local and global concerns. Each circle linked Madison faculty and advanced graduate students with groups of scholars around the world working on similar issues. Research circles active in Stage One activities included "Legacies of Authoritarianism: Cultural Production, Collective Trauma, and Global Justice," "Media, Identity and Performance," "Cultural Pluralism," "Labor and the Global Economy," and "Border Studies." ¹⁰