International Centre of Asia–Pacific Studies: A Centre for Excellence

Professor Kam Louie, Interim Director of the International Centre of Asia–Pacific Studies and Professor James J Fox, Director of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
Photograph by Darren Boyd, Coombs Photography

Professor Kam Louie has a look of slight bemusement on his face.

He is trying to think how a Bulletin article on the new International Centre of Excellence in Asia–Pacific Studies might possibly be illustrated.

How, after all, does one find photographs to accompany an article about a centre that, at the time of writing, had neither staff nor premises?

Professor Louie, Head of the China and Korea Centre in the Faculty of Asian Studies at the ANU, was appointed Interim Director of the International Centre of Excellence in July 2004, after the ANU signed the contract with the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) to host the centre in April 2004.

In that short space of time, a clear sense is emerging of just what this centre might achieve — once a home has been found for it and its inaugural director and staff are have been appointed. Broad program parameters have already been set. Guidelines for funding have been written. In another few months there will be no shortage of photo opportunities.

The centre is an exciting development for those engaged in Asian and Pacific studies at Australia's universities.

Australia has long had an enviable reputation in the area of Asia–Pacific studies, and the ANU is rightly regarded as among the world's top five universities in the field.

Now, that national expertise — and the ANU's capacity to lend leadership, direction and profile to that expertise — has been recognised, with the establishment of the International Centre of Excellence in Asia–Pacific Studies.

The centre is one of four international centres of excellence to be supported by the Federal Government with seed funding totalling $35.5 million.

Professor Louie says the establishment of the centre, and the choice of the ANU as the host institution, are of practical and symbolic importance.

The funding of the centre — the only one of the four new centres of excellence to focus on the humanities — is a welcome recognition by government of the importance of Asia–Pacific studies to Australia's future, Professor Louie says.

And the selection of the ANU to host the centre is an acknowledgment of the university's pre-eminence in the field. Centre staff will be able to draw upon the resources of and enhance the work of the ANU's Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, its Faculty of Asian Studies, the Asia–Pacific School of Government and the new Asia–Pacific College of Diplomacy, which has been established fom the same $8.8 million grant as the centre of excellence.

But while the ANU will be the hub of the new centre, this is essentially a collaborative venture. And, as the name suggests, it is one that will extend beyond Australia, to involve partners from around the world.

Domestic institutions consulted during planning for the centre included Griffith University's Asia–Pacific Research Institute, La Trobe University's Asian Studies Program, the University of Melbourne's Institute of Asian Languages and Societies, the University of Queensland's School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, and the Centre for Asia–Pacific Social Transformation Studies, run by the University of Newcastle and the University of Wollongong.

A number of leading international centres of Asia–Pacific studies have already expressed an interest in becoming involved in centre activities. They include Cornell University Graduate School, Ithaca, Leiden University's International Institute for Asian Studies, in the Netherlands, the National University of Singapore's Asian Research Institute, and the University of Hawaii's East West Centre.

A major role of the centre will be to raise the profile of Australia as a world leader in Asian and Pacific studies. And it isn't just the rest of the world that needs to be made more conscious of this fact — Professor Louie believes that the consciousness-raising needs to begin at home.

He says that while many Australian institutions already have a first-class reputation for their Asia–Pacific offerings both nationally and internationally, the centre of excellence will be able to project a coherent and comprehensive profile to potential students and research partners. It will allow individual institutions to derive strength and profile from their combined critical mass.

One of the major vehicles by which the centre of excellence hopes to generate a higher profile for Asia–Pacific studies in Australia will be its website.

The site will act as a portal to the many resources and institutions involved in Asia–Pacific studies. For the first time, information regarding the breadth of activity will be gathered in one place, for the benefit not only of potential domestic and international students, scholars and researchers, but also business, industry, government and non-government organisations.

The website will help the centre achieve another of its main objectives — to improve access to the research and teaching resources located in numerous collections around the country. There is no denying the wealth of Asia–Pacific resources that already exists in the nation's libraries, archives and galleries, but until now this has been a dispersed wealth, its individual jewels sometimes known and appreciated only by those attached to a particular program in a particular institution.

Professor Louie hopes the centre will be able to improve awareness of this dispersed wealth, creating a national resource network linking institutional databases to the centre's website and ensuring that valuable items or collections are not lost to scholarship. In time, the plan is for the centre to go a step further, bringing institutions together in a search for ways to improve procedures for the acquisition, housing and cataloguing of Asia–Pacific material. As a first step along that road, plans are already advanced to bring the ANU, the National Library of Australia and the National Museum of Australia together in a project to better integrate their Asia–Pacific library resources — in particular to advance the digitisation of material and the expansion of their online databases.

Consolidating documentary resources is important, but so is the consolidation of human resources. Through its grants program the centre will bring scholars and government and non-government Asia–Pacific experts from across the region to the ANU to collaborate on research and teaching. Seed funding will also be available for other activities that build international links, such as workshops and conferences.

For example, the centre is helping to build upon and expand the ANU's Asia–Pacific Week, which was held for the first time in 2004. The 2005 event, to be held in late January and early February, is being coordinated by the National Institute for Asia and the Pacific. It will feature graduate summer schools in Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Pacific, South Asian, Thai and Vietnamese Studies, as well as cultural events such as exhibitions, film screenings and performances.

Professor Louie believes there is scope to extract even greater networking benefits from the week. He wants invited participants from the region to stay beyond the week, so that they can avail themselves of Australian resources and strengthen their professional networks with their Australian peers, preparing the ground for future collaboration.

While the centre of excellence will only be in a position to provide modest seed grants for research, rather than full-scale funding of major collaborations, Professor Louie believes this kind of early-stage support fills a real gap, and will complement the work of the new Asia–Pacific Futures research network.

Commonwealth funding for that network was announced by the Australian Research Council in August this year. Asia–Pacific Futures is one of 24 research networks to be funded by the ARC and one of four to be hosted by the ANU (the others are in the fields of nanotechnology, advanced materials and open systems). It is designed to stimulate interdisciplinary, collaborative research.

While the centre of excellence will focus on both Asia and the Pacific, Professor Louie considers there is a special urgency when it comes to promoting and raising the profile of Pacific studies.

In world terms, Australia has a reasonably strong Pacific studies tradition, but it exhibits certain structural peculiarities that set it apart from comparable fields of study. One, Professor Louie says, is the absence of a strong undergraduate tradition. At the post-graduate and research level there are concentrations of world-class professional expertise, such as the ANU's Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. But individuals make their way to RSPAS from anthropology, political science, linguistics, history or economics. Hardly any universities offer an undergraduate major in Pacific studies.

And that, says Professor Louie, has made it harder for Pacific specialists to feel part of something coherent, something that can be marketed to potential students, or that can be used to attract the notice of the world.

That is why one of the very first priorities of the centre of excellence has been to encourage the establishment of a Pacific Studies Association of Australia — along the lines of the long-established Asian Studies Association of Australia, which boasts several hundred members.

An inaugural meeting of Pacificists from all around Australia was held at ANU on 9 October and the Australian Association for Advancment of Pacific Studies was formed at that meeting. At this meeting, too, a AAAPS council was elected and plans are already in place to hold a AAAPS conference sometime in 2005. The centre of excellence intends to enhance the work of the Asian and Pacific studies professional associations by substantially providing assistance to the secretariats of both the new Pacific Studies Association and the Asian Studies Association of Australia.

While fostering greater engagement between existing scholarly communities within Australia and internationally is an important aim of the centre of excellence, Professor Louie is also keen to see the centre play a role in ensuring a supply of future Australian scholars. That means fostering a greater appreciation among potential undergraduates — and their parents, teachers and careers advisers — of the importance of Asian and Pacific studies. It means heightening a public awareness that Asia and the Pacific aren't just fascinating areas for scholarly inquiry, but critical to Australia's future — economically, socially, culturally, and in terms of regional security.

Professor Louie believes that the push for greater identification with the region that occurred in the 1980s went some way to helping Australians appreciate the need to better understand their Asian and Pacific neighbours. But he also thinks that the push wasn't great enough, or sustained enough. He believes many Australians still don't fully appreciate the value of studying our region, particularly when it comes to the Pacific nations, which are often less significant as trading partners or less visible politically than some Asian countries.

Professor Louie believes the centre of excellence has a crucial role to play in heightening the prestige and appeal of Asia–Pacific studies among potential undergraduates and graduate students — and that includes international students.

Education is Australia's sixth largest export and the Asian region is by far the biggest market for Australian education. Eighty per cent of full fee-paying international students at Australian institutions come from Asia. But as Professor Louie points out, many of them gravitate towards business and other courses. Relatively few enrol in Asia–Pacific programs.

To change that balance the centre of excellence plans an Asia–Pacific Education Forum, bringing together international recruitment agents, the international marketing arm of Australia's university community (the IDP) and the Federal Government's Australian Education International, to explore ways of increasing the number of international students in Asia–Pacific programs.

One possibility is the establishment of a recruitment network, reaching into and targeting new markets in North America, Latin America and Europe.

Other possibilities include supporting institutions to attend recruitment fairs, or developing recruitment material that can be customised by individual institutions.

For a centre that doesn't yet exist, a lot of scaffolding has been put in place and some sturdy foundations have been laid. Professor Louie's aim is to have everything in place so the centre can begin its work the moment the new director walks through the door. Guidelines for the grants programs have been written and application forms designed. On paper, everything is ready to roll. All that is missing is the building, and the people.

Since this article was written, the Director (John Fitzgerald), Executive Officer (Richard Thompson) and Website/Resources Manager (Valerie Shavgarova) have been appointed. Further information about the Centre can be found on the website: http://icepas.anu.edu.au/