As part of “China's south,” Southeast Asia has historically assumed a peripheral position when juxtaposed against the power of the Chinese state. In the existing scholarly literature, the power asymmetry is reflected in the ostensible bias where most studies are about China's presence in or engagement with Southeast Asia rather than the reverse; studies on the presence or influence of Southeast Asia in China have been a marginal enterprise. The present volume aims to fill this void by expl...

This book explores the challenges to news professionalism and media autonomy stemming from the state, market pressure, the digitalization of communication, and a polarized civil society in Hong Kong. China is tightening its control over post-handover Hong Kong, which includes press freedom. Harsh market competition, coupled with shifting readership from mainstream media to digital platforms, is squeezing the business viability of media organizations. The polarization of civil society in po...

Contemporary practice in art is concerned not only with aesthetics but also with ethics. The philosophy of geoethics emphasizes the importance of cultivating our ecological consciousness. Geoethics calls on our ethical responsibility to care for our planet and work toward a harmonious relationship between humankind and the environment. Furthermore, geoethics encourages us to seek out truth within our relationships and to fight for equality and fairness for all humans. The core ide...

Ecocritical Menopause: Women, Literature, Environment, “The Change” is the first volume of its kind to bring together cross-sectional ecofeminist voices privileging women’s menopausal positionality within literary works. This collection reexamines menopause across the disciplinary fields of ecofeminism and ecocriticism as clearly the most neglected phase of the menstrual cycle and aims to develop a critical discourse in counterpoint to the persistent cultural and critical legacies...

Combining a historical approach of Chineseness and a contemporary perspective on the social construction of Chineseness, this book provides comparative insights to understand the contingent complexities of ethnic and social formations in both China and among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. This book focuses on the experiences and practices of these people, who as mobile agents are free to embrace or reject being defined as Chinese by moving across borders and reinterpreting their o...

Lee, Chan and their contributors analyse the different kinds of soft power deployed by Taiwan in its bid to strengthen its relations with its neighbours in Southeast Asia.Despite not having formal diplomatic relations with Southeast Asian countries after their diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China decades ago, Taiwan continues to be a key economic and socio-cultural partner for the region at large. Successive administrations in Taiwan from the Chen to Tsai eras h...

This open access book presents Southeast Asia as an interesting and conceptually meaningful site to interrogate the transnational paradigm. In featuring research from and across different nations in Southeast Asia, it asks in what ways Southeast Asia lends itself to nuanced applications of transnationalism, and what the wider cultural and collective implications of that might be. Instead of viewing the past and the present as oppositional concepts of time, a temporal continuum is applied t...

This volume presents a comparative analysis of three key cities—Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taipei—during the Cold War. Strategically positioned within international trade networks, these cities also served as critical nodes for both regional conflicts and cooperation. The comparison primarily focuses on their urban landscapes, drawing on the memories embedded in their collective memoryscapes, the imagery presented in their filmscapes, and the perceptions of their inhabitants, as reflected i...

This book considers recent developments in Thai history and historiography, examining why Thai studies had suffered under a combination of protectionism, uncritical learning, and unwillingness to engage with scholarship from abroad. The essays collected here explore, from Thai perspectives, innovations in theory and methodology in Thai studies, gathering critical insights from disciplines such as anthropology and cultural studies. The book may also serve as an entry to Thai studies, inform...

How should we regard the contemporary proliferation of images? Today, visual information is available as projected, printed and on-screen imagery, in the forms of video games, scientific data, virtual environments and architectural renderings. Fearful and anti-visualist responses to this phenomenon abound. Spread by digital technologies, images are thought to threaten the word and privilege surface value over content. Yet as they multiply, images face unprecedented competition for attentio...