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),…

Professor Victor T. King of the Institute of Asian Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam (IAS @ UBD) has edited a special issue of the journal Suvannabhumi: Multi-disciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies on “Debating Southeast Asia.”The papers in this special issue were first presented at a conference organized by the Institute for Southeast Asian Studies at Busan University of Foreign Studies in 2019 on the theme of “The Recognition and Construction of Southeast Asia as a Whole.”In addition to an introduction, Professor King also has a paper in this special issue entitled “Who Made Southeast Asia? Personages, Programs and Problems…

In a new article on Vietnamese history, Associate Professor Liam C. Kelley reinterprets what we know about the historical development of the southern half of Vietnam. The southern half of Vietnam has long been characterized by historians as historically less-centralized, less-Confucian, and less-bureaucratic than the Vietnamese heartland in the Red River delta. However, through a comparative examination of tax collection and military recruitment in these two regions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Dr. Kelley argues that the southern half of Vietnam in many ways surpassed its northern counterpart in its centralized control of the population. This paper enables historians…

F. Merlin Franco, Assistant Professor and Deputy Director of the Institute of Asian Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam has recently co-authored an article on traditional healing practices and medicinal plants in the Kiudang area of Tutong District, Brunei Darussalam.Entitled “A Comparative Account of the Traditional Healing Practices and Healers and Non-healers in the Kiudang Area of Brunei Darussalam,” this article has just been published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology.To quote from the abstract, the article compares “the traditional medicinal knowledge and associated spiritual practices of healers with that of non-healers, to understand the relevance of healers in contemporary times. Given…

Associate Professor Paul J. Carnegie and Professor Victor T. King of the Institute of Asian Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam (IAS @ UBD) have just published a chapter on human security in Oceania.Entitled “Mapping Circumstances in Oceania: Reconsidering Human Security in an Age of Globalisation,” this chapter appears in the new book Mapping Security in the Pacific: A Focus on Context, Gender and Organisational Culture (Routledge 2020).In their chapter, Carnegie and King “contend that the field of human security (which tends to be dominated by the disciplinary concerns of international relations, development and security studies) needs to engage more fully…