Asia Pacific Viewpoint最新文献

Creative methods offer caring ways to conduct research with people from migrant and refugee backgrounds. We reflect on the contributions creative methods, migration studies, and feminist care ethics bring to more caring qualitative research. Guided by feminist work on care and ethics, we expand how creative methods can be employed. Drawing on a range of research traditions, we further develop the concept of ‘researching-with’. We propose researching-with as a methodological approach that takes seriously relationships and responsibilities in research practices. This approach advocates for conducting research collaboratively and in solidarity with research communities. The paper reflects on researching-with creative methods in a research collaboration involving women from migrant and refugee backgrounds, staff and volunteers, a PhD student and a supervisor involving a series of creative workshops at Zara's House in Newcastle, Australia. We expand on some of the methodological learnings of researching-with, including the possibilities and challenges of this methodological approach.

Based on in-depth interviews with 51 Chinese international students at an Australian university, this article draws on descriptive statistics and qualitative analysis to elucidate the group's participation in Student Guild (Student Union) elections. The empirical findings demonstrate that—contrary to popular media perceptions—most Chinese international students are passive about participating in campus elections for two key factors. Firstly, many Chinese international students contend that the benefits of participating in these elections do not outweigh the direct and opportunity costs. Notably, some perceive that the required knowledge and skills for engaging in these elections do not align with their career development aspirations. Secondly, many Chinese international students who fundamentally lack an appreciation for the political values and institutions that underpin these elections tend to distance themselves from what they perceive as a flawed and meaningless practice. Instead of seeking to infiltrate these elections, they exhibit indifference and detachment.

This article brings degrowth into conversation with urbanisation through our analysis of environmental transformations in the coastal Southern city of Semarang, Indonesia. We analyse two collective activisms to build a theoretical dialogue between degrowth and provincialised urban political ecology (UPE). The first activism contests the ongoing development of pro-growth giant flood infrastructure and is politically rooted in mangrove ecosystem conservation. The second activism conserves groundwater. We identify mangrove and groundwater conservations as spatial practices of degrowth in/from the south. We make connections between the two scholarships and activisms to expand their political and pragmatic possibilities and, therefore, open space for more hopeful alternatives for the city's future.

Environmental peacebuilding, as a construct and practice, holds potential to recognise environmental conflicts and respond to them; however, indigenous perspectives can be obscured in its related processes, projects and reviews. This article draws on in depth research by the authors from within indigenous communities in the Solomon Islands to compare local experiences of environmental rupture, conflict and change. This comparison of local experience is integrated with analysis of colonial, neocolonial and globalisation factors to link local environmental conflicts with global and national governance, global extractive and agricultural industries, and security and governance interventions with local conflict conditions. This article argues for a reorientation of the field towards decolonising knowledge, through drawing on indigenous epistemologies and ontologies to frame and respond to environmental conflicts, and therefore peacebuilding. In doing so, space can be opened to recognise the unique relationship of indigenous people with terrestrial and marine areas, and the unacknowledged culpability and responsibilities of actors at national and global levels in fostering environmental conflicts.

Drawing on the domains of integration, this paper illuminates the integration experiences of female marriage migrants from lower income cross-national families in Singapore. Through interviews with 38 cross-national families of the Singaporean-husband and foreign-wife pairing, we show how the integration of lower income marriage migrants in Singapore is experienced through the interrelated domains of the structural, social and cultural, while foregrounding the family as an added domain of interest. Although marriage to citizen-husbands create privileged pathways to citizenship rights and hence forms of integration, this is neither predictable nor unidirectional—family members play a crucial part in rendering support and at times, constraining female marriage migrants' integration. Contributing to wider debates on whether cross-border marriages are indicators, if not, facilitators of integration, this paper shows how female marriage migrants' integration in Singapore is highly relational and tied not only to the level of support and openness from their husbands, their interactions with other domains of integration are also dependent on the quality of relationships with extended family members.

Given Taiwan's limited formal diplomatic recognition, this paper examines interviews with diplomats/officials from one of Taiwan's Pacific allies, Tuvalu, as well as interviews with other Pacific diplomats in Taiwan and Taiwanese diplomats/officials, to outline diverging conceptions of diplomacy in Taiwan's official alliances. The paper first analyses interviews with Pacific diplomats in Taiwan, discussing how diplomats link meanings of diplomacy to socio-cultural protocols in their home countries. Three themes that emerge in explanations of diplomacy are bartering/exchange, building/maintaining friendships and properly building/reinforcing inter-island relationships. The paper next considers how interviews with Tuvaluan diplomats/officials focused on themes similar to those outlined by other Pacific diplomats but also revealed specific cultural mechanisms of diplomacy including the alofa, or ‘giving of gifts’. Subsequently, the article examines how Taiwanese diplomats/officials contemplate diplomacy, specifically how Taiwan's competition with China/the PRC has created negative conceptions of formal diplomacy. Taiwanese ideas of diplomacy often clash with Tuvaluan/Pacific conceptions because Taiwan sees diplomatic allies as always on the verge of severing ties and inherently disloyal. The conclusion discusses how cultural values and their influence on conceptions of diplomacy can engender tension in diplomatic relationships while also underscoring the importance of seeing diplomacy as both multifaceted and multiply understood.