Dynamic Contexts of Australian Research on Asia-Pacific

Asian Studies emerged as an inter-disciplinary "area study" in the post-WWII era in response to accelerating demands to break down barriers separating traditional disciplines and reintegrate research and teaching around discrete regions. By the 1970s Asian Studies was well established in Australian universities as an inter-disciplinary field of area-studies research. Over the following three decades, Australian scholarship on the cultures and societies of Asia developed into one of the most dynamic fields of study in the humanities and social sciences in Australian higher education, and earned an international reputation for its scope, its quality, and its responsiveness to developments in the region.

The spread and development of Australian scholarship about Asia in the past-WWII era has been recounted in a number of earlier reports. Governments and educators since 1945 have sporadically recognized that Australia's geography and interests dictate that Australians need to know about their region, and that special efforts need to be made to acquire and spread knowledge of the region. Publicly-funded research into the states and societies of Asia has been considered an important element of this larger mission.

Consistent attempts have also been made to audit and to monitor the results of efforts in the systemic growth of Asia-related teaching and research over the past three decades. Stephen FitzGerald's report, Asia in Australian Education (Canberra, 1980), was undertaken a decade after publication of The Teaching of Asian Languages and Cultures: Report of the Commonwealth Advisory Committee (Auchmuty Report) (Canberra, 1971). A decade later again, John Ingleson conducted a wide-ranging review, Asia in Australian Higher Education, for the Asian Studies Council (Canberra, 1989). Most recently, the Asian Studies Association of Australia has conducted a national review of trends in Asian languages and studies in higher education over the decade since publication of the Ingleson Report. Maximizing Australia's Asia Knowledge (Melbourne, 2002) was written by a team headed by Robin Jeffrey, the first-listed CI in the Network Asia Strategic Research Initiative.¹ Asian Studies ranks among the most competent fields of study in Australian higher education in its capacity to research and monitor its own growth and development.

Earlier reports have paid less attention to actual research capacity in Asian area studies in Australia than they have to teaching and learning. Nor have they addressed major developments in international research and scholarship that have had bearing on Asian Studies research in Australia over the past decade. This report makes a start in both directions.

One systemic issue that has not been closely canvassed in earlier reports is the impact of globalization on Asian-area research in Australia. Since the 1990s there has been renewed interest in crossing disciplinary and regional boundaries in area-studies research, much as there was at the birth of Asian Studies in the post-war era. But significant developments have taken place within the trend toward inter-disciplinary and inter-regional research in Australia and elsewhere. Some of these were identified for US scholars by the authors of the Ford Foundation report, Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies (1999). Some specific to Australia have been identified in the present report.

By the mid-1990s, aspects of Asian Studies had come to be counted among the barriers that needed to be ruptured for research and scholarship to move forward. A number of different unifying principles emerged to compete with national states and societies as units for organizing knowledge in the social sciences and humanities. These included common historical trajectories (colonial or post-colonial experiences), identities (gender studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, queer studies), and a number of immediate large-scale problems that transcended national and even regional boundaries, including people flows, trade and currency flows, health and disease, telecommunications and cultural circulation, environmental issues, and terrorism.

Researchers in Australia were among the first to recognise the significance of these developments and among the earliest to publish detailed comparative studies of the impact of globalisation on the societies, cultures and economies of the Asian region. These included world-first comparative studies of the "new rich" in Asia and on "crony capitalism" in Southeast Asia, and the first centre and academic journal for post-colonial studies.

The rapidity of globalisation also presented challenges to Asian-area research in Australia. According to the global sensibility of the 1990s, the traditional areas which made up the "units" of Asian-area studies came to be pictured as porous filters through which people, trade, information, and cultures moved in new patterns of trans-national and inter-regional circulation. In its cruder versions, the new global vision challenged local forms of knowledge and disputed the value of intensive study of local languages, cultures, histories, and societies on which the edifice of area-studies was initially founded.

At the same time, however, the global sensibility of the 1990s highlighted the emergence of large-scale continental regions organised around Europe, the Americas and Asia, and heightened sensitivity to the responses of local cultures, identities and practices within these mega-regions. The global perspective of research began to focus increasingly on the placement of local languages, cultures and societies in relation to the allegedly-homogenising tendencies of globalisation - on aspects of glibly-termed "glocal" responses to larger regional and global developments.

Events since 11 September 2001 have confirmed the equal merit of global and local perspectives in approaching the transformation of the Asia-Pacific region. As noted in the accompanying statement on the international state of the field, public commentators universally bemoan the absence of "specialists" with requisite skills and area-knowledge to explain developments leading to and from the post 9/11 world. By all accounts, globalization appears to require not fewer but more people with specialist cultural skills and local historical familiarity. On the one hand, the field-intensive techniques of "area studies" have been reaffirmed. On the other, problems associated with globalisation appear to require researchers trained in the new disciplines and in the problem-solving approaches of inter-disciplinary and inter-regional studies. In this second sense many of the older assumptions and methodologies developed in the post-War era no longer do service.

Balancing the need for basic skills in languages and cultures with those of pure and applied research is a major challenge facing Australia's Asia-area research community if it is to play a leading role in international research in the 21st century. The challenge lies in reshaping Australia's significant capacity in Asian-area research so that it can respond to the demands of a constantly changing and remorselessly communicating world, and move forward with rapidly evolving research paradigms.

To assist with this effort, the SRI Asia and China network teams carried out a region-by-region audit of Australian research capacity in Asia-area research, and surveyed their membership on a number of issues bearing on Australian research capacity, the impact of Australian research, and on problems and prospects for existing and future research networks in the field.

¹ Earlier reports are reviewed in Maximizing Australia's Asia Knowledge (2002) pp. 3-5.