Publications

Jia Gao. Chinese Immigration and Australian Politics: A Critical Analysis on a Merit-Based Immigration System. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

This book analyses how an increasing number of new Chinese migrants have integrated into Australian society and added a new dimension to Australian domestic politics as a result of Australia’s merit-based immigration system and its shift towards Asia. These policies have helped Australia sustain its growth without a recession for decades, but have also slowly changed established patterns in the distribution of job opportunities, wealth, and political influence in the country. These transformations have recently triggered a strong Sinophobic campaign in Australia, the most disturbing aspect of which is the denial of the successful integration of Chinese migrants into Australian society. Based on evidence gathered through a longitudinal study of Chinese migrants in Australia, this book examines the misconceptions troubling Australia’s current China debate from six important but overlooked perspectives, ranging from migration policy changes, economic factors, grassroots responses, the role of major political parties, community activism, to knowledge issues.

Anne McLaren. Slow Train to Democracy: Memoirs of Life in Shanghai, 1978 to 1979. Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2020.

This memoir offers a rare insight into everyday life during the first year of the reform movement that created the China of the twenty-first century. The book interweaves personal encounters with records of the democracy movement in Shanghai, revealing a vast outpouring of grievances by ordinary people at a time of dramatic social change.

Akihiro Ogawa and Philip Seaton (eds.,). New Frontiers in Japanese Studies. Routledge, 2020.

Over the last 70 years, Japanese Studies scholarship has gone through several dominant paradigms, from ‘demystifying the Japanese’, to analysis of Japanese economic strength, to discussion of global interest in Japanese popular culture. This book assesses this literature, considering future directions for research into the 2020s and beyond.

Shifting the geographical emphasis of Japanese Studies away from the West to the Asia-Pacific region, this book identifies topic areas in which research focusing on Japan will play an important role in global debates in the coming years. This includes the evolution of area studies, coping with ageing populations, the various patterns of migration and environmental breakdown. With chapters from an international team of contributors, including significant representation from the Asia-Pacific region, this book enacts Yoshio Sugimoto’s notion of ‘cosmopolitan methodology’ to discuss Japan in an interdisciplinary and transnational context and provides overviews of how Japanese Studies is evolving in other Asian countries such as China and Indonesia.

New Frontiers in Japanese Studies is a thought-provoking volume and will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese and Asian Studies.

Jia Gao and Yuanyuan Su. Social Mobilisation in Post-Industrial China The Case of Rural Urbanisation Authored Research Books. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019.

In recent years China has experienced intense economic development. Previously a rapidly urbanising industrial economy, the country has become a post-industrial economy with a service sector that accounts for almost half the nation’s GDP. This transformation has created many socio-political changes, but key among them is social mobilisation. This book provides a full and systematic analysis of social mobilisation in China, and how its use as part of state capacity has evolved.

The first book on the topic written in English in recent decades, Social Mobilisation in Post-Industrial China provides readers with a thorough analysis covering all vertical administrative levels, as well as considering new participants. Bringing together interdisciplinary analyses of the current uses of social mobilisation in China, this book draws on empirically rich original research. It presents a clear picture of how boyi (‘strategic game-playing’) is acted out at different levels of society and within different sectors, and the social dynamics at work.

Dwi Noverini Djenar, Michael C. Ewing, and Howard Manns. Style and Intersubjectivity in Youth Interaction. Boston/Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, 2018.

This book examines how style and intersubjective meanings emerge through language use. It is innovative in theoretical scope and empirical focus. It brings together insights from discourse-functional linguistics, stylistics, and conversation analysis to understand how language resources are used to enact stances in intersubjective space. While there are numerous studies devoted to youth language, the focus has been mainly on face-to-face interaction. Other types of youth interaction, particularly in mediated forms, have received little attention. This book draws on data from four different text types - conversation, e-forums, comics, and teen fiction - to highlight the multidirectional nature of style construction.

Indonesia provides a rich context for the study of style and intersubjectivity among youth. In constructing style, Indonesian urban youth have been moving away from conventions which emphasised hierarchy and uniformity toward new ways of connecting in intersubjective space. This book analyses how these new ways are realised in different text types.

Claire Maree and Kaori Oakno (eds.,). Discourse, Gender and Shifting Identities in Japan: The Longitudinal Study of Kobe Women's Ethnographic Interviews 1989-2019, Phase One. Routledge Taylor and Francis 2018.

This book is the first in a unique series drawn from an interdisciplinary, longitudinal project entitled 'Thirty Years of Talk.' For 30 years, Okano recorded ethnographic interviews and collected data on the language of working class women in Kobe, Japan. This long-range study sketches the transitions in these women's lives and how their language use, discourse and identities change in specific sociocultural contexts as they shift through different stages of their personal and public lives. It is a ground-breaking, 'real time' panel study that follows the same individuals and observes the same phenomena at regular intervals over three decades. In this volume the authors examine the changes in the speech of one particular woman, Kanako, as her social identity shifts from high-school girl to mother and fisherman's wife, and as her relationship with the interviewer develops. They identify changes in linguistic strategies as she negotiates gender/sexuality norms, stylistic features related to the construction of rapport, the use of discourse markers as she gets older, and the interviewer's information-seeking strategies.

Akihiro Ogawa (ed.,). Routledge Handbook of Civil Society in Asia. Routledge Taylor and Francis, 2018.

The Routledge Handbook of Civil Society in Asia is an interdisciplinary resource, covering one of the most dynamically expanding sectors in contemporary Asia. Originally a product of Western thinking, civil society represents a particular set of relationships between the state and either society or the individual. Each culture, however, moulds its own version of civil society, reflecting its most important values and traditions.

This handbook provides a comprehensive survey of the directions and nuances of civil society, featuring contributions by leading specialists on Asian society from the fields of political science, sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines. Comprising thirty-five essays on critical topics and issues, it is divided into two main sections.

Abdullah Saeed. Human Rights and Islam: An Introduction to Key Debates Between Islamic Law and International Human Rights Law. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018.

Is there a basis for human rights in Islam? Beginning with an exploration of what rights are and how the human rights discourse developed, Abdullah Saeed explores the resources that exist within Islamic tradition in support of human rights. He identifies those that are compatible with international human rights law and can be garnered to promote and protect human rights in Muslim-majority states.

Relying on significant texts in the Qur'an and hadith, early juristic discourses and modern Islamic scholarship, Saeed explains the compatibilities and incompatibilities between Islamic law and international human rights law. He also deals separately with a number of specific rights that are usually considered somewhat incompatible with Islamic law, such as the rights of women and children, freedom of expression and religion and jihad and the laws of war. Each chapter also contains a case to allow readers to look more closely at issues of relevance.

Human Rights and Islam emphasises the need for Muslims to rethink problematic areas of Islamic thought that are difficult to reconcile with contemporary conceptions of human rights. Students of Islamic law, human rights and Islam in the modern period will appreciate this challenging but accessible look at an important topic.

Tim Lindsey and Dave McRae (eds.,). Strangers Next Door? Indonesia and Australia in the Asian Century. Hart Publishing, 2018.

There are no two neighbouring countries anywhere in the world that are more different than Indonesia and Australia. They differ hugely in religion, language, culture, history, geography, race, economics, worldview and population (Indonesia, 270 million, Australia less than 10 per cent of that). In fact, Indonesia and Australia have almost nothing in common other than the accident of geographic proximity. This makes their relationship turbulent, volatile and often unpredictable.

Strangers Next Door? brings together insiders and leading observers to critically assess the state of Australia–Indonesia relations and their future prospects, offering insights into why the relationship is so important for Australia, why it is so often in crisis, and what this means for the future. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the Indo-Pacific region, Southeast Asia, Australia and Indonesia, and each country's politics, economy and foreign policy.

Thomas Reuter. Rumah Leluhur Kami: Kelebihdahuluan dan Dualisme dalam Masyarakat Bali Dataran Tinggi. Yayasan Pustaka Obor Indonesia, 2018.

Rumah Leluhur Kami is an ethnographic about the Bali Mountain Community (Bali Aga), an ethnic group that has a unique history and culture as native to the island of Bali. In a popular notion of Balinese identity, highland people are presented as a conceptual counterpart to castles built in the lowlands of the southern island of Bali by newcomers from the Javanese kingdom, Majapahit. Hidden in the cultural shadows of the palace, the world of Bali's highlands has been largely neglected, even though Bali Island is one of the most studied places in the world. This book discusses the social and economic organisation status of the Bali Aga community from the perspective of innovative theories about "overprotection".

Ana Dragojlovic and Alex Broom. Bodies and Suffering: Emotions and Relations of Care. Routledge, 2017

This book is a critical response to a range of problems - some theoretical, others empirical - that shape questions surrounding the lived experience of suffering. It explores how moral and ethical questions of personal suffering are experienced, contested, negotiated and institutionalised. Bodies and Suffering investigates the moral labour and significance invested in actions to care for others, or in failing to do so. It also explores circumstances - personal, political and social - under which that which is perceived as non-moral becomes moral. Drawing on case studies and empirical research, Bodies and Suffering examines the idea of the suffering body across different cultures and contexts and the experience and treatment of these suffering bodies. The book draws on theories of affect, embodiment, the phenomenology of illness and moralities of care, to produce a nuanced understanding of suffering as being located across the assumed borders of time, space, bodies, persons and things.

Edwin Jurriens. Visual Media in Indonesia Video Vanguard. Routledge, 2017

This book focuses on the visual media, one of the key factors in shaping the contemporary ecology of colliding environments. Case-studies include video artists, community media activists, television programme makers and literary authors in the fourth most populous country in the world, Indonesia. The author demonstrates that these actors are part of an international creative and social vanguard that reflect on, criticise and rework the multidimensional impact of the visual media in imaginative and innovative ways. Their work explores alternative and more sustainable presents and futures for Indonesia and the world. This research is urgent and timely, as Indonesia has emerged in recent years as one of the world's most vibrant hubs for contemporary art and media experimentation.

Edwin Jurriens and Ross Tapsell (eds.,). Digital Indonesia: Connectivity and Divergence. ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute, 2017

This book places Indonesia at the forefront of the global debate about the impact of "disruptive" digital technologies. Digital technology is fast becoming the core of life, work, culture and identity. Yet, while the number of Indonesians using the internet has followed the upward global trend, some groups - the poor, the elderly, women, the less well-educated, people living in remote communities - are disadvantaged. This interdisciplinary collection of essays by leading researchers and scholars, as well as e-governance and e-commerce insiders, examines the impact of digitalisation on the media industry, governance, commerce, informal sector employment, education, cybercrime, terrorism, religion, artistic and cultural expression, and much more. It presents groundbreaking analysis of the impact of digitalisation in one of the worlds most diverse, geographically vast nations. In weighing arguments about the opportunities and challenges presented by digitalisation, it puts the very idea of a technological revolution into critical perspective.

Jiyoung Song (ed.,). A History of Human Rights Society in Singapore 1965-2015. Routledge, 2017.

To celebrate Singapore's fiftieth anniversary for its independence from Malaysia in 2015, 35 students, academics and activists came together to discuss and write about pioneering Singaporean human rights activists and their under-reported stories in Singapore. The city-state is known for its remarkable economic success while having strict laws on individual freedom in the name of national security, public order and racial harmony. Singapore’s tough stance on human rights, however, does not negate the long and persistent existence of a human rights society that is little known to the world until today. This volume, composed of nine distinctive chapters, records a history of human rights activists, their campaigns, main contentions with the government, survival strategies and other untold stories in Singapore's first 50 years of state-building.

Vedi Hadiz. Islamic Populism in Indonesia and the Middle East. Amsterdam University Press, 2016

In a novel approach to the field of Islamic politics, this provocative new study compares the evolution of Islamic populism in Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, to the Middle East. Utilising approaches from historical sociology and political economy, Vedi R. Hadiz argues that competing strands of Islamic politics can be understood as the product of contemporary struggles over power, material resources and the result of conflict across a variety of social and historical contexts.

Ana Dragojlovic. Beyond Bali subaltern citizens and post-colonial intimacy. Amsterdam University Press, 2016

Beyond Bali: Subaltern Citizens and Post-Colonial Intimacy explores Balinese subaltern citizens' production of post-colonial intimacy both during colonialism and as they continue to have effects in the present. Balinese subaltern citizens, whether former leftist political exiles, artist or everyday citizens, rather than criticising, evoke colonial hierarchies of themselves as carriers of unique cultural traditions firstly promoted by the Dutch colonial policy (named 'Balinization'), to position themselves higher than the other foreigners in the Dutch post-colonial matrix of difference.

Jia Gao, Catherine Ingram and Pookong Kee (eds.,). Global Media and Public Diplomacy in Sino-Western Relations. Routledge, 2016

This volume presents a broad social science audience with recent innovative scholarship and research findings on global media and public diplomacy concerning Sino-Western relations. It focuses on the implicit nexus between global media and public diplomacy, and their actual utilisation in and impact on the shifting relationships between China and the West. Special attention is given to the changing nature of globalised media in both China and Western nations, and how globalised media is influencing, shaping and changing international politics.

Dave McRae. Poso: Sejarah Komprehensif Kekerasan Antar Agama Terpanjang di Indonesia Pasca Reformasi. Marjin Kiri, 2016.

Based on 10 years of research carried out even when the conflict was ongoing, this book is the first comprehensive description of violent conflict in Poso. By interviewing survivors and perpetrators directly, examining and comparing police investigation reports and confessions in court, Dave McRae tried to answer the basic questions: how can an area like Poso become an interfaith battlefield? How can this escalation of violent conflict equal the intensity of the civil war, even though it only occurs in one district in Indonesia? How can conflict continue amid an increasingly stable and democratic national situation?

Abdullah Said; Rowan Gould and Adis Duderija. Islamic teachings on contemporary issues for young Muslims. National Centre for Contemporary Islamic Studies, 2016.

The first decade and a half of the twenty-first century has seen a number of world events the have brought increased attention to Islam as a religion and as a broad tradition encompassing different streams of law, theology and political thought…

The need for an accessible educational resource which guides. Young people of Muslim faith through some of the most complex and challenging issues that they with be exposed to has never been clearer. To this end NCCIS at the University of Melbourne has drawn on its expertise and that of other scholars in the areas of islamic tradition, history, theology and law to develop this resource for teachers to use in clarifying and discussing some of these issues with their students.

Thomas Reuter (ed.,). Averting a Global Environmental Collapse The Role of Anthropology and Local Knowledge. Cambridge Scholars Publishing

The World Science Union (ICSU) has recognised that knowledge of the social sciences is indispensable for facilitating the major socio-cultural transformations now required, and, together with the International Social Science Council (ISSC), called for a mainstreaming of environmental research in the social sciences at the Rio+20 Earth Summit. The two major international organisations in anthropology, IUAES and WCAA, responded to this call by co-sponsoring a symposium on environmental change at the Manchester World Anthropology Congress, and by creating a scientific Commission for Anthropology and Environment, which then hosted a second symposium in Chiba City, Tokyo, in May 2014. This volume is a selection of the many papers presented by a truly international group of experts at the two symposia.

Akihiro Ogawa. Lifelong Learning in Neoliberal Japan Risk, Community, and Knowledge. Suny Press, 2015

Akihiro Ogawa explores Japan's recent embrace of lifelong learning as a means by which a neoliberal state deals with risk. Lifelong learning has been heavily promoted by Japan's policymakers, and statistics find one-third of Japanese people engaged in some form of these activities. Activities that increase abilities and improve health help manage the insecurity that comes with Japan's new economic order and increased income disparity. Ogawa notes that the state attempts to integrate the divided and polarised Japanese population through a newly imagined collectivity, atarashii kōkyō or the New Public Commons, a concept that attempts to redefine the boundaries of moral responsibility between the state and the individual, with greater emphasis on the virtues of self-regulation.

Jia Gao. Chinese Migrant Entrepreneurship in Australia from the 1990s Case Studies of Success in Sino-Australian Relations. Chandos Publishing, 2015

For more than two decades Australia has not only prospered without a recession but has achieved a higher growth rate than any Western country. This achievement has been credited to Australia's historic shift to Asia; the transformation of the relationship between these two countries is one of the most important changes in the Asia-Pacific region. However, the role of new Chinese migrants in transforming Sino-Australian relations through their entrepreneurial activities has not been deeply explored. Chinese Migrant Entrepreneurship in Australia from the 1990s adds new theoretical considerations and empirical evidence to a growing interest in entrepreneurship, and presents an account of a group of new Chinese migrant entrepreneurs who have succeeded in their business ventures significantly contributing to both Australia and China.