At the core of this book is a seemingly simple question: What is Asia? the answer involves an investigation of the multifarious discursive and material constructions of Asia within the region and in the West. It reconstructs regional constellations, intersections and relations in their national, transnational and global contexts. Moving far beyond the more well-known Japanese Pan-Asianism of th…
This innovative study demonstrates how Japanese empire-builders invented and appropriated the discourse of overpopulation to justify Japanese settler colonialism across the Pacific. Lu defines this overpopulation discourse as 'Malthusian expansionism'. This was a set of ideas that demanded additional land abroad to accommodate the supposed surplus people in domestic society on the one hand and …
The suppression of piracy and other forms of maritime violence was a keystone in the colonisation of Southeast Asia. Focusing on what was seen in the nineteenth century as the three most pirate-infested areas in the region - the Sulu Sea, the Strait of Malacca and Indochina - this comparative study in colonial history explores how piracy was defined, contested and used to resist or justify colo…
Ecologists have long based their conceptual frameworks in the natural sciences. Recently, however, they have acknowledged that ecosystems cannot be understood without taking into account human interventions that may have taken place for thousands of years. And for their part, social scientists have recognized that human behavior must be understood in the environment in which it is acted out. Re…
edited by Yves Cabannes, Mike Douglass, and Rita Padawangi.
Information and communication technologies have long promised to provide quality education, improve health care, allow open government, and solve environmental issues. To realize this potential and influence policy-making and program design, the Singapore Internet Research Centre, supported by IDRC, created an innovative research capacity-building program, SIRCA. The program supports interdisci…
This book documents the regulatory framework covering quality assurance in distance education in several Asian countries. It draws on the experience of 16 distance education and e-learning institutions to reveal their main challenges in developing quality assurance systems. While offering solutions to these challenges, the book demonstrates that staff engagement is the key to creating a culture…
From the 1920s on, popular music in Southeast Asia was a mass-audience phenomenon that drew new connections between indigenous musical styles and contemporary genres from elsewhere to create new, hybrid forms. This book presents a cultural history of modern Southeast Asia from the vantage point of popular music, considering not just singers and musicians but their fans as well, showing how the …
Aviation has played an important part in shaping Australia’s culture and history through the course of the twentieth century. Australia embraced aviation from its earliest days, eagerly responding to its potential to cover a challenging country, to bring far-flung communities closer and to provide services that could not be delivered any other way. Add the romance of pioneer heroes, the vital…
‘This volume brings together a diversity of international scholars, unified in the theme of expanding scientific knowledge about humanity’s past in the Asia-Pacific region. The contents in total encompass a deep time range, concerning the origins and dispersals of anatomically modern humans, the lifestyles of Pleistocene and early Holocene Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, the emergence of Neo…