Asia Pacific Viewpoint最新文献

Racism, sexism and gendered violence disadvantage Indigenous Papuan women, yet government responses often focus on individual interventions like ‘raising awareness’ or training. In this article, we build on efforts to challenge these narratives about women's vulnerabilities. We draw on life history interviews with older Papuan women in Jayapura to rethink vulnerabilities and everyday struggles in the context of structural inequalities. We interpret their stories as forms of ‘survivance’ and argue that contrary to dominant perspectives, Papuan women are not economic novices or passive victims. Rather, opportunities have narrowed over time, and women's long history of activity, strategy, persistence and resistance has largely been forgotten. Women's life histories shed light on urban colonialism and Indigenous survivance in Jayapura since the 1940s, when Jayapura was still a Dutch colonial capital and not yet an Indonesian frontier. In a time dominated by concerns about Papuan demise, their experiences are provocative for rethinking vulnerabilities.

There is a consensus among small Pacific islands that the extent to which they benefit from international tourism largely depends on how much of the value created by tourism remains in the local economy. This study examines how the value created in the hotel industry is distributed among the key stakeholders in a small Pacific island context. We used aggregated income statements of full-service and limited-service hotels from the STR Inc., a hotel industry data company, to calculate the value distribution among the key stakeholders in the hotel industry of a small Pacific island. We found that labour and owners captured most of the value created, whereas hotel management companies and franchisors captured a small share of the value. Our results suggest that tourism workers' ability to take united action and hence to negotiate higher wages will result in higher value capture by local labour and less value leaking out of the local economy. Our results also reveal that foreign ownership in the hotel industry is the single largest cause of economic leakages. The study has several implications for the tourism-based growth policies in small Pacific islands.

This study investigates the North Korean defector phenomenon by approaching YouTube as an internet forum for public discourse, using the novel analytic approaches of social network analysis, text mining and semantic analysis. The research produced three main findings. First, individual YouTube content creators are most influential in the video networks pertaining to the subject of North Korean defectors. Second, on YouTube space, the image of North Korea tends to be negative because of the prevalence of defectors' testimony of their life experiences. Finally, such negative narratives of North Korea on YouTube might have a negative influence by blocking the reunification of Korea. In conclusion, this study suggests the South Korean government and other relevant global actors should conduct thorough and continuous examinations of North Korean defectors' perceptions of South Koreans and vice versa. This study calls for the international community to take further action to formulate proper policy instruments.

Neighbourhoods are places of social encounters on a daily basis, but they are getting insufficient attention from policy makers and urban studies in conceptualising the city. While the city is often the unit of analysis and boundaries of data collection, social constructions of the city are mostly from neighbourhoods. By shifting the analysis to the neighbourhood scale, we are moving scholarship and research on two fronts. First, we need to think about city building knowledge at a pedagogical and methodological level. Second, we want to examine processes and amenity creation at the neighbourhood scale and make visible the ways these add to city politics, economy, and culture. Articles in this special issue contribute to urban scholarship in the following ways: (i) neighbourhood as a method of urban studies; (ii) understanding urban politics and government; (iii) the role of urban informality and small businesses; and (iv) the role of traditional neighbourhood institutions in the social life of the city. Neighbourhoods can be poorly resourced and inward-looking, but in many cases localised interests, relationships and organisations are capable of collective action, networking beyond their localities, and inspiring its residents with aspirations of the city's future directions.

There is no such thing as a neighbourhood. But neighbourhoods are everywhere. Neighbourhoods are regularly described as things, but we cannot touch them. We typically understand neighbourhoods as places, but we can neither see them nor find their edges. The more one stares at a neighbourhood, the more it seems impossible to see it. Nevertheless, there is something—an often intangible and indescribably social something—compelling us not only to imagine but to experience the neighbourhood being stared at as a real thing. In social science analysis, one important thing that we stare at but cannot see is ‘the social’. To more properly understand the neighbourhood, then, this paper takes the social seriously. It places people and their relationships at the centre of a project to develop a working understanding of the neighbourhood. Instead of asking, ‘What is a neighbourhood?’ the paper suggests that we must always begin by asking, ‘Who is a neighbourhood?’ The empirical basis for the paper's conceptual reflections on the neighbourhood emerge out of a collaborative research project conducted under the auspices of a multicity research project called the Southeast Asia Neighbourhoods Network.

Cities of the Global South constitute a wide band in terms of their integration into the global economy. For cities like Hanoi, the sustained influx of foreign direct investments has propelled them into playing increasingly important roles as manufacturing centres. Along with this new role is the influx of expatriate managers who watch overseas manufacturing subsidiaries. Our paper focuses on Korean expatriate neighbourhoods and their impacts on Hanoi. More specifically, we show how the presence of such communities has resulted in important changes in the host city, firstly in housing typology (such as the introduction of high-rise mixed-use complexes), and secondly, in cultural consumption. We argue that Korean privilege, cultural consumption practices, and the desire for support and solidarity within the Korean social network in Hanoi work to create new forms of city-building knowledge, one that originates from the neighbourhoods of these new and rich settlers in the city. Such forms of knowledge subsequently go on to reshape the economic, cultural and social spaces in the globalising city.

Later-life migrants, as older people living away from their home nations, occupy multiply-precarious positions in relation to national COVID-19 pandemic responses. Concern has particularly centred on this group's increased risk of social and linguistic exclusion. We explore the perspectives of later-life older Chinese and Koreans living in New Zealand during the nation's COVID-19 lockdown of 2020. This paper presents a sub-analysis of culturally-matched interviews conducted with 3 Korean and 5 Chinese later-life migrants. These participants are a sub-sample of a larger qualitative interview study comprising 44 interviews. A social capital approach has been used to aid conceptualisation of participants' experiences and a reflexive thematic approach guided analysis. Despite their underrepresentation in national response efforts, Chinese and Korean later-life migrants resourcefully participated in ethnically-specific pandemic initiatives. Three themes identified were: (1) taking it seriously (2) already digitally literate (3) challenges and difficulties. Older Asian migrants engaged in a range of creative strategies to stay connected during COVID-19 lockdowns which drew heavily on pre-existing social capital. Future pandemic responses should seek to improve connectedness between the national government COVID-19 response and older Korean and Chinese later-life migrants.

Interpreted as ‘unity in diversity’, Indonesia's national politicians appropriated the slogan Bhinneka Tunggal Ika from a fourteenth century poem to legitimise one nation-state for the diverse archipelago. As Indonesia becomes a rapidly urbanising country, the concepts of ‘unity’ and ‘diversity’ intertwine with changing landscapes and societies. With the growth of cities as centres of population and economic activities, the intensity of development in the city has transformed urban spaces, social interactions, economies and aspirations. Much of these urban transformations have affected urban kampung, early forms of urban settlement. Urban kampung has a historical role in the making of ‘unity in diversity’ as a national concept, but official discourses rarely associate kampung with the slogan, even when concerns on tolerance and diversity increase in urbanising Indonesia. Using urban kampung as a viewpoint in city- and nation-building, we conduct archival and ethnographic research to interpret everyday practices of Bhinneka Tunggal Ika. To what extent does the slogan play a role in the social construction of city neighbourhoods? How do everyday realities in an urban kampung relate to the national slogan? As kampung remains relatively autonomous but also stigmatised in the city, taking kampung as a viewpoint allows insights into city- and nation-building knowledge that integrate everyday practice and conceptualization of the city and the nation.

The tourism industry has long been recognised for supporting women in achieving economic empowerment and social freedom through entrepreneurial and employment opportunities. Widely recognised as a women-dominated sector, tourism is deemed to be a facilitator of women's development following the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As the existing literature suggests, women's involvement in tourism activities supports local economic growth and development, while facilitating social transformation that enables them to create their own identities. Despite these achievements, several studies noted the persisting issues women face in participating in tourism. With the goal of contributing to existing discourses, this paper aims to analyse their experiences in community entrepreneurship by examining several community-involved tourism enterprises in the Philippines. The findings of this study reveal that women have been largely involved in tourism activities in that country, yet their experiences working in these enterprises vary. The opportunities and challenges identified in this study can serve as a springboard for further analysis of the experience of women working in the Philippine tourism industry.

Although the influence of mobility on place attachment has received attention in the literature, this relationship varies between groups. Unlike those who move to enjoy their retirement, for example, older migrants arriving in Shenzhen come to the city ‘passively,’ drawn by the needs of their children. This paper advances understanding of the concept of place attachment by illustrating the relationships between its components. Analysis of interview and questionnaire responses revealed the following relationships between three focal components of place attachment. Place dependence first directly influenced affective attachment and then indirectly affected place identity. Leisure involvement had a positive impact on place dependence and affective attachment but no direct effect on place identity. Residential satisfaction was an antecedent of all three focal dimensions of place attachment. No direct relationship was found between leisure involvement and residential satisfaction.