Description

The Asia Program is pleased to recommend a discretionary grant to the Southeast Asian Studies Regional Exchange Program (SEASREP) for a mapping study of Southeast Asian Studies (SEAS) in Southeast Asia. The primary goals of the study will be to describe the state of SEAS in the region, assess needs and concerns of the field there, and provide recommendations aimed at addressing those needs.
The idea behind this project was generated by our experience with LuceSEA in its first two rounds. The LuceSEA guidelines open eligibility to academic and research institutions in SEA, on the condition that proposed activities include collaboration with one or more U.S.-based institutions. But the response from SEA has been relatively light and the proposals have been weak or fallen wide of our guidelines. It may be that the call for proposals has not yet effectively reached SEA institutions. Of more concern is the likelihood that applications are not competitive due to differences in institutional histories, cultures and structures; level of training available to scholars in the region (still less developed than in East Asia); and lack of experience with proposal writing.
Because our Asia Program’s primary scope has been to increase American capacity and our grantees are largely U.S.-based, and because we do not have a field office in Asia, direct contact with leading Asian scholars and institutions is, as a rule, limited. Contact is, instead, indirect through our grantees. In earlier decades, SEAS in SEA was quite weak, if not altogether non-existent. While scholars conducted research and taught on their own countries, they had little interest in neighboring countries, comparative work, or the region as a whole. That situation has begun to change, in part because of SEASREP’s work. LuceSEA guidelines recognize that building effective capacity in the U.S. now requires expansion of engagement with Asian scholars and incorporation of their voices and perspectives. But apart from encouraging American institutions to collaborate with SEA counterparts, we want to consider effective mechanisms for inviting participation from the region.
In our post-Round One debriefing, we conceived the idea of identifying a SEA organization that could serve as a bridge to regional institutions and scholars. SEASREP’s name came up in that discussion as a strong candidate. Established in the late 1990s with initial funding from the Toyota Foundation and later from others including the Japan Foundation (a primary supporter) and Rockefeller Foundation, it has worked in the region for a quarter century to encourage cross-disciplinary and cross-border study of SEA. Although it is a small organization, over its life it has developed an extensive network of grantees and contacts and knowledge about the field. In this, it is unique. As our advisor Mary Zurbuchen commented upon reading the proposal, “Looking at the transcribed interviews with SEASREP alumni, you get a sense of how much has been achieved over the years. SEASREP is still standing where many initiatives have come and gone…. What SEASREP has provided is a consistent attention to regional connection, and at fundamental levels (eg, languages, getting things published).”
In July 2019, I met in Leiden with Drs. Maris Diokno and Maitrii Aung-Thwin (bios in proposal attachments). Diokno is a co-founder and executive director of SEASREP. Aung-Thwin, a SEASREP trustee, is a young leader who has been active in promoting the development of SEAS not only in SEA but also in Japan, Korea and China. They were receptive to our LuceSEA idea and to exploring ways to work with HLF. The timing is auspicious in that the Japan Foundation has wound down its funding for SEA, necessitating SEASREP to scale back its programming considerably. During our conversation, Diokno and Aung-Thwin raised the mapping study as an aspiration for the next phase of SEASREP’s work. The proposal contains a helpful section on how SEAS in SEA is being defined for the purposes of this study.
The project is attractive to us, first as a means to educate ourselves about the state of the field in SEA and inform our thinking about a larger LuceSEA project in the region. Second, the study would allow us to better assess SEASREP’s capabilities and potential, particularly if we hope to consider its involvement in a larger effort. Finally, SEASREP plans for the study to serve as the core of a database for use by scholars and practitioners to identify those with similar research interests and candidates for collaborative efforts. 
SEASREP will contribute Diokno’s time to lead the project. Our grant would cover compensation for a research assistant, honoraria for scholars from 10 countries commissioned to write reports on the state of the field, and travel for those scholars and SEASREP board members to three workshops – the first two to convene the report writers and the last to consolidate and analyze the data.