Issue-based, Interdisciplinary and Collaborative: The Way Forward for Southeast Asian Studies

What path should Southeast Asian Studies take in today’s technology- driven world? I propose three avenues as the way forward. Let me start with the first, the issue-based approach. I believe that Southeast Asian Studies, be it based in the West or within Southeast Asia, and conducted by ‘local’ Southeast Asian scholars or non-local ones, should move beyond the scholarly traditions established in the Anglo-American academia to focus on pressing issues facing the region (political, religious, environmental, etc.) — all for a more practical knowledge production and in consideration of regional and even global implications. Twenty-first century issues, such as the impact of the digital revolution on different aspects of collective and individual life in the region, ought also to be included.

By so doing, the critical social science of Southeast Asia will deepen  understandings of problems and point the way to practical solutions rather than offer mere descriptive work. Take climate change as an example, which requires not only natural science but also interdisciplinary social science to investigate its impact on Southeast Asian peoples and their responses — national adaptation policies by governments and autonomous adaptation by individual households in affected areas. Even the communication of climate change is a topic of interest as the reporting of this global phenomenon through various media channels, mainstream and by citizens, affects, perhaps even shapes, the way people deal with the impact of climate change.

An issue-based approach also broadens the scope of Southeast Asia beyond the physical region to global spaces that accommodate cross-national mobilities and connectivities by Southeast Asians and a wide range of cultural interactions. Extra-regional geopolitical and environmental matters also pose threats to the region, such as China’s insistence upon the nine-dash line in waters surrounding the Philippines, upstream dams and water issues along the Mekong River, cross-border haze in maritime Southeast Asia, and human trafficking through the borderlands. Crimes, forms of violence, and health are other matters that Southeast Asian studies may want to focus on for more practical, epistemological (i.e., evidence-based) responses.

The second and third avenues are interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to Southeast Asian Studies. Interdisciplinary understandings enable scholars to connect the dots from different aspects of an issue and apply various analytical trends so as to arrive at a critical and incisive appreciation of the complexity and diversity of regional issues and the ways in which Southeast Asian people interpret ideas and construct social meaning. The cross-pollination of disciplines is the way forward to fix any mismatch between dominant theories and empirical evidence, especially in the era of increasing globalization and digitalization. No single discipline can provide all the answers or perhaps the best answer. An interdisciplinary focus also enables students in Southeast Asian studies to become more versatile and agile in a world of uncertainty and disorder. From interdisciplinary classrooms, students mature as problem solvers who transcend disciplinary expertise and adapt dynamically and flexibly to change.

Collaboration is the natural partner of interdisciplinarity. But here I speak of collaborative projects among social scientists in and outside the region. Such collaboration will dispel the old West-versus-the-rest paradigm as well as the insider-outsider dichotomy. It is time to cast aside the question of being autonomous vs. being Western-minded in theoretical and conceptual underpinnings in favor of a deep and more inclusive understanding of the region. Many western scholars, after all, have accepted that north American and European social theories do not explain the changes in our part of the world, especially amid 21st-century global modernity (Seth, 2013) because these theories come from self-reflexive analyses of the West, primarily the United States (Pheng, 2001; Jackson, 2018: 218; Seth, 139). Joint research programs across borders of national academies, as discussed by Mielke and Hornidge (2014) and Jackson (2019), will redress the Eurocentrism and the American dominance of theory, forming more inclusive epistemic communities. As Jackson puts it: “Critical scholarship in the twenty-first century global academy must start from an ethical foundation of collaboration” (2019: 69).

In my own way I try to apply the approaches I propose here. I entered academia with a background in environmental anthropology, environmental geography and political ecology – which were interwoven in my PhD dissertation at NUS. Prodded by my supervisor, I went beyond Thai studies and environmental studies in order to examine the relationship between local wisdom and nature in a northern Thai protected area. My dissertation thus became an interdisciplinary academic departure which opened my world to a host of interdisciplinary topics such as as people’s autonomous adaptation to climate change, environmental communication, environmental citizenship in the digital age, environmental justice, investigative environmental journalism, and citizen journalism and new media in contemporary society.

Now I work as an interdisciplinary educator and researcher of Southeast Asian studies at USSH, Vietnam National University-Ho Chi Minh City. In every class as well as my in research, I promote holistic understandings of Vietnamese society and Southeast Asia through a comparative and interdisciplinary literature review. Recently I offered a new course entitled “New Media and Southeast Asian Society” at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and guide my students to look at the impact of new media on various aspects of Southeast Asian society: religion, the environment, gender, civil society, and nationalism, among others. My experience has been rewarding (I think also for my students). The approaches I suggest here are not for the distant future; we each can contribute to making Southeast Asian studies relevant and meaningful.