Publications
Overview
Academic staff make significant contributions to the understanding of Asian languages and societies, publishing in English and other languages.
Recent major publications by Asia Institute academic staff are categorised by year.
2021

Jonathan Henshaw; Craig A. Smith and Norman Smith (eds.,). Translating the Occupation The Japanese Invasion of China, 1931-45. UBC Press, 2021 UBC Press, 2021.
Jonathan Henshaw; Craig A. Smith and Norman Smith. “Introduction: Discarding Binaries and Embracing Heteroglossia,” in Jonathan Henshaw; Craig A. Smith and Norman Smith (eds.,). Translating the Occupation The Japanese Invasion of China, 1931-45. UBC Press, 2021, pp. 3-18.
Craig A. Smith. “Collaboration and Propaganda: Yang Honglie and His Eight Speeches on Greater Asianism,” in Jonathan Henshaw; Craig A. Smith and Norman Smith (eds.,). Translating the Occupation The Japanese Invasion of China, 1931-45. UBC Press, 2021, pp. 223-237.
Craig A. Smith. “The New Citizens’ Movement and Wang Jingwei-ism,” in Jonathan Henshaw; Craig A. Smith and Norman Smith (eds.,). Translating the Occupation The Japanese Invasion of China, 1931-45. UBC Press, 2021, pp. 238-251.
From 1931 to 1945, as Japanese imperialism developed and spread throughout China, three regions experienced life under occupation: the puppet state of Manchukuo, East China, and North China. Each did so in a distinct manner, but making sense of experiences and decisions made during this crucial period has been an elusive goal for historians. ...
This volume offers a practical, accessible sourcebook from which to challenge standard narratives. The texts have been carefully selected to deepen our understanding of the myriad tensions, transformations, and continuities in Chinese wartime society. Translating the Occupation reasserts the centrality of the occupation to twentieth-century Chinese history and opens the door further to much-needed analysis.
Matthew Nelson. “Regime Types, Regime Transitions, and Religion in Pakistan,” in Melani Cammet and Pauline Jones (eds.,). The Oxford Handbook of Politics in Muslim Societies. Oxford, 2021.
How does religion shape regime types, and regime transitions, in Muslim-majority states? Focusing on Pakistan, this chapter examines the limited role of religious groups and religious ideas in driving political transitions between military and civilian-led regimes. ...
This chapter, however, moves beyond military to ostensibly religious limitations on democracy, noting that, while nonreligious protests often figure in transitions away from authoritarian rule, religious constitutional provisions diminishing the rights of non-Muslims have produced what scholars of hybrid regimes call an “exclusionary” or “illiberal” democracy.

Akihiro Ogawa. “Civil Society in Japan” in Robert Pekkanen and Saadia Pekkanen (eds.,). The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Politics. Oxford University Press, 2021.
This chapter discusses civil society in contemporary Japan, shedding light on two major actors – NPOs and social movements. Since the launch of the first NPO (nonprofit organisation) in 1998, the number has increased dramatically. The analysis focuses on co-production, a policy collaboration technique between NPOs and the Japanese government under the framework of New Public Governance. Social movements are also examined, focusing on anti-nuclear activism – one of the most consistent activisms in Japan, which has been reignited since the nuclear disaster of March 11, 2011. In particular, this chapter presents a brief reflective account of the No Nukes Asia Forum, a pan-Asian transnational activism that originated in Japan.
Boon Young Han; Min Ok Yang and Ryan Gustafsson. “The Social Exclusion of Child-Rearing Unwed Mothers in South Korea,” in Handbook of Social Inclusion. Springer International Publishing, 2021, pp. 1-21.
2020

Claire Maree. queerqueen: Linguistic Excess in Japanese Media. Oxford University Press, 2020.
Queerqueen examines the editing and writing of queer excess into Japanese popular culture through mediatisation of queerqueen styles. The book illustrates how a diversity of gender identifications, sexual orientations, and discursive styles are packaged together as if to form a homogenous character – the queerqueen. In a range of genres from conversational dialogue books to lifestyle television and animations, queerqueen styles are configured as crossing into popular media via the body of the authentically “queer male,” whose “authentic” speech is produced spontaneously without scripting. Editorial interventions enacted through the collaborative language labor of stenographers and record makers, graphic designers and illustrators, and editorial teams (re)trace the sonic qualities of the queerqueen. Through visual mimesis, contemporaneous citational practices, and the mobilisation of nostalgia, queerqueen styles are enregistered as talk that is inherently excessive and in need of containment. Editorial acts of containment such as self-censorship simultaneously expose the sexualised nature of gendered norms of talk in Japanese. It is also here that possible spaces for dissent open up through contestation of the limits to excess. The visual and sonic crossings of gender norms unsettle heteronormative mapping of speech styles onto statically gendered bodies. Strategic use of a variety of linguistic resources such as hyper-masculine forms and hyper-politeness exposes the veneers of technologies that seek to regiment excess. Analysis of the inscription of queerqueen styles reveals metapragmatic stereotypes of gender, sexuality, and desire that are essential to the business of mainstream entertainment.

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.
Yongxian Luo. Morphology in Kra-Dai Languages. Oxford University Press. 2020.
The Kra-Dai languages (also known as Kam-Tai, Tai-Kadai, Tai-Kradai, Daic) are generally described as one of the most representative and extreme examples of isolating and analytic types; they are tonal, lacking in inflectional morphology of the type found in Indo-European. Kra-Dai languages can be said to have no distinction for number and gender in morphology, although many languages have lexical items to indicate number and gender, and some of these are increasingly used as prefixable morphemes. The majority of basic vocabulary items are monosyllabic, but disyllabic and multi-syllabic words also abound.

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.

Jemma Purdey, Antje Missbach, and Dave McRae. Indonesia State and Society in Transition. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2020.
Indonesia remains a country in transition even now, some two decades after its extraordinary shift from authoritarianism to democracy and from economic crisis to a rapidly growing economy. What explains the trajectory of that shift? What challenges does this island nation of 270 million people – with the world’s largest Muslim population – face now, as the quality of democratic life erodes and it grapples with profound social and economic inequalities?
Addressing these questions, the authors comprehensively explore the dynamics of Indonesia’s politics, society, political economy, and culture, as well as its role in the international order.

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.
2019

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.

Ali Akbar and Abdullah Saeed. Contemporary Approaches to the Qur’an and its Interpretation in Iran. Routledge, 2019.
This book sets out how contemporary Iranian scholars have approached the Qur’an during recent decades. It particularly aims to explore the contributions of scholars that have emerged in the post 1979-revolution era, outlining their primary interpretive methods and foundational theories regarding the reading of the Qur’an.
Examining issues such as the status of women, democracy, freedom of religion and human rights, this book analyses the theoretical contributions of several Iranian scholars, some of which are new to the English-speaking academy. The hermeneutical approaches of figures such Abdolkarim Soroush, Muhammad Mojtahed Shabestari, Mohsen Kadivar, Hasan Yousefi-Eshkevari, Abolqasem Fanaie and Mostafa Malekian are presented and then analysed to demonstrate how a contextualist approach to the Qu’ran has been formed in response to the influence of Western Orientalism. The effect of this approach to the Qu’ran is then shown to have wide-ranging effects on Iranian society.
This study reveals Qu’ranic thought that has been largely overlooked by the West. It will, therefore. Be of great use to academics in Religious, Islamic and Qur’anic studies as well as those studying the culture of Iran and the Middle East more generally.

Vedi Hadiz. “Islamic populism and the politics of neoliberal inequalities,” in Carlos de la Torre (ed.,). Routledge Handbook of Global Populism. Routledge, 2019.
The Routledge Handbook of Global Populism provides instructors, students, and researchers with a thorough and systematic overview of the history and development of populism and analyses the main debates. It is divided into sections on the theories of populism, on political and social theory and populism, on how populists politicise inequalities and differences, on the media and populism, on its ambiguous relationships with democratisation and authoritarianism, and on the distinct regional manifestations of populism. Leading international academics from history, political science, media studies, and sociology map innovative ideas and areas of theoretical and empirical research to understand the phenomenon of global populism.

Lewis Mayo and Julian Millie. “Grave Visiting (Ziyara) in Indonesia,” in Babak Rahimi and Peyman Eshaghi (eds.,). Muslim Pilgrimage in the Modern World. The University of North Carolina Press. 2019.
Traveling to and far beyond the Hajj, the most well-known Muslim pilgrimage, the volume’s contributors reveal and analyse emerging contemporary Islamic pilgrimage practices around the world, in minority- and majority-Muslim countries as well as in urban and rural settings. What was once a tiny religious attraction in a remote village, for example, may begin to draw increasing numbers of pilgrims to shrines and tombs as the result of new means of travel, thus triggering significant changes in the traditional rituals, and livelihoods, of the local people. Organised around three key themes – history and politics; embodiment, memory, and material religion; and communications – the book reveals how rituals, practices, and institutions are experienced in the context of an inexorable global capitalism.
2018

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".
2017

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.
2016

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.