Associate Professor Liam C. Kelley of the Institute of Asian Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam (IAS @ UBD) has recently published an article in the journal Research in Comparative and International Education (RICE) entitled “The Decline of Asian Studies in the West and the Rise of Knowledge Production in Asia: An Autoethnographic Reflection on Mobility, Knowledge Production, and Academic Discourses.”
This article was a contribution to a special issue of RICE on “Transnationally-trained Scholars Working in Global Contexts: Knowledge Production, Identity, Epistemology, and Career Trajectories” that was edited by Senior Profsesor Phan Le Ha (SHIBIE, UBD) and Rommel Curaming (FASS, UBD), both of whom are IAS Research Associates.
The abstract of the paper is as follows:
“In recent years, the discipline of Asian Studies has struggled to adapt to a changing world and has seen a decline in student interest. A discourse about this issue has emerged that attributes this ‘crisis’ in Asian Studies to various supposed faults in its forms of knowledge production, and that looks with hope to Asia for new forms of knowledge about the region.
“This paper takes issue with this discourse by employing an autoethnographic narrative to examine the ways in which mobility has affected the discipline of Asian Studies. It traces a path, followed by this author and many others, from an affective fascination with a foreign society to the professional production of knowledge. It then examines how this professional knowledge production has transformed under the influence of different forms of mobility (state-sponsored, private, and global digital), transformations that have led to the current ‘crisis’ in Asian Studies.”
For more information about this special issue, please visit the Research in Comparative and International Education website.
