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Plasmodium falciparum malaria originated when Plasmodium praefalciparum, a gorilla malaria parasite transmitted by African sylvan anopheline mosquitoes, adapted to humans. Pfs47, a protein on the parasite surface mediates P. falciparum evasion of the mosquito immune system by interacting with a midgut receptor and is critical for Plasmodium adaptation to different anopheline species. Genetic analysis of 4,971 Pfs47 gene sequences from different continents revealed that Asia and Papua New Guinea harbor Pfs47 haplotypes more similar to its ortholog in P. praefalciparum at sites that determine vector compatibility, suggesting that ancestral P. falciparum readily adapted to Asian vectors. Consistent with this observation, Pfs47-receptor gene sequences from African sylvan malaria vectors, such as Anopheles moucheti and An. marshallii, were found to share greater similarity with those of Asian vectors than those of vectors of the African An. gambiae complex. Furthermore, experimental infections provide direct evidence that transformed P. falciparum parasites carrying Pfs47 orthologs of P. praefalciparum or P. reichenowi were more effective at evading the immune system of the Asian malaria vector An. dirus than An. gambiae. We propose that high compatibility of ancestral P. falciparum Pfs47 with the receptors of Asian vectors facilitated the early dispersal of human malaria to the Asian continent, without having to first adapt to sub-Saharan vectors of the An. gambiae complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past studies have shown that disease threat increases people's hostility towards immigrants. However, in our survey (N = 9571) conducted in five advanced Asian economies during the outbreak of COVID‐19, we found that COVID‐19 vulnerability was positively associated with support for immigration. Drawing on insight from policy feedback theories, we propose that the positive association is caused by the presence of widespread border crossing restrictions, which have changed the meaning and cost implications of COVID‐19. As the outbreak expands, the pandemic has become not just a threat to people's health but also a barrier to globalization. Consequently, people who are worried about the disease may see globalization processes, including migration, as signs of pandemic relief. We find supportive evidence in our analysis. First, the positive association between COVID‐19 vulnerability and support for immigration is more salient among respondents who considered restrictions on international travel to be stringent. Second, the positive association between COVID‐19 vulnerability and immigration attitude was mediated by perceived economic threat from the pandemic and contribution by immigrants towards the containment of the pandemic. These findings suggest that disease control measures adopted at the global level may alter certain widely accepted effects of disease threat on immigration attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do young women understand and experience intimacy in the age of social media, and are their experiences qualitatively different after the millennial turn and the rapid expansion of digital technologies? What impact do these digital experiences have on how millennial subjects experience, understand, and negotiate social relations in globalising Asia? Here are some preliminary findings from a multi-sited ongoing research project which looks at college-going women in Bangalore, Singapore, Hong Kong and Guangzhou to understand how their lives in these aspiring "smart" cities are being shaped by the phenomenal growth of digital technology use in Asia in the past ten years. Our findings thus far suggest that social institutions such as family and marriage are being redefined through digital mediation, a process that includes boundary-drawing, creating zones of intimacy, and the reconfiguration of relationships in the digital domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1980s, rising Asia has opened up our understanding of liberal citizenship to the forces of a globalizing world economy. Previously, scholars have treated citizenship as an ideal type – a construct of politico-legal and spiritual elements – determined by the nation-state. My approach situates the unstable character of citizenship within the vicissitudes of global capitalism and competitive nations. By investigating citizenship not as a fixed construct, but as a contingent category subject to transnational forces, I emphasize the interaction of newcomers and nation-states in shaping the mutations of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This article investigates and classifies firm resources for the internationalization of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) from emerging countries. Originality/value: SMEs from emerging countries in global markets evidence their more restricted access to resources for internationalization. The mainstream international business literature classifies firm’s resources identified in large companies from developed economies. This research classifies firms’ internationalization resources located in different emerging countries based on a systematic literature review (SLR) and interviews. This paper contributes to the theoretical development about the internationalization of SMEs from emerging countries, indicating the importance of organizational resources in this process. Design/methodology/approach: This paper presents an exploratory research developed in two stages: a SLR on emerging countries and interviews with experts, institutions, and SMEs about the Brazilian context. Bibliographic research and an interview with semi-structured script were adopted as data collection techniques. Interviews were analyzed with NVivo software using content analysis technique and providing categorization of resources. Findings: Up to 2016, 15 works mentioned resources for the internationalization of SMEs from emerging countries and seven were done in Asia. We identified 72 resources in ten emerging countries. Organizational resources predominate. The use of financial resources in Brazil contradicts the trend in other emerging countries. More tangible resources seem less strategic for SMEs’ internationalization from emerging countries when compared to more intangible resources, as organizational ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects the outcomes of a quantitative study of the relationship between the processes of globalization and economic growth. It covers 29 countries in Asia and Africa and the period from 2001 to 2019. Hypotheses about the relationship between the level of globalization, country's investment risk premium and economic growth are considered. Based on the results of the regression analysis of the panel data for the mentioned above period, it was concluded that the relationship between economic dynamics and the degree of inclusion of Asian and African countries in the global economy was negative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Positioning migrants as quintessential globalisation subjects, this paper reveals how the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the ambivalent positioning of migration as a pathway for human development. Drawing on interviews with international and domestic labour migrants from Bangladesh, India, Laos and Myanmar working in Laos, Myanmar, China, Singapore and Thailand, the paper explores the vulnerabilities, challenges and opportunities that have come with migration and how these have been reconfigured as the pandemic has progressed, disproportionately heightening migrants' exposure to the virus and their socioeconomic precarity. Through their personal stories, the paper provides insights into the evolving livelihood pathways of migrant workers during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, their (changing) views of migration as a route to progress, and tentatively sets out how ruptures caused by the pandemic may lead to a re-thinking of livelihood pathways for such men and women and their families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Difference is foundational to urban governance and urban life. This article—and the special issue—focuses analytically on the juxtaposition of multiple urban differences, and what happens especially in relation to urban authority and citizenship when such differences articulate with each other. This analytical work is based on a conceptual lens we call juxtacity, which is used to examine the origins, dynamics, and effects of urban divides, where urban divides are seen as active, situated domains in themselves that provide key opportunities for understanding and theorizing complex urban dynamics. The juxtacity approach emphasizes three key elements of difference and division—relationality, articulation, and productive co-constitution—and their differentiated effects. The focus is especially on but not limited to more overt, visible structures of urban domination, but consciously counters the ways in which more common sense hierarchies of power leave out a wide range of subtler forms of inequality, domination, exclusion, and violence. These latter are crucial for understanding differences and divisions in cities around the world. The juxtacity approach counters EuroAmerican-as-universal urban theory. Including cases from Africa and Asia, the special issue employs a form of openly comparative southern urbanism that contributes to the wider project of theorizing from the south/southeast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study determines the dynamic linkages between globalization, financial development and carbon emissions in Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) countries in the presence of energy intensity and economic growth under the framework of Environment Kuznets Curve (EKC). This study employs the panel data from 1990 to 2016, Westerlund cointegration technique to find long-run cointegration, and Continuously Updated Bias-Corrected (CUP-BC) and Continuously Updated Fully Modified (CUP-FM) methods to check the long-run elasticities between the variables. Empirical results indicate that globalization and financial development significantly reduce carbon emissions, but economic growth and energy intensity increase them. These results support the EKC hypothesis for APEC countries. The Dumitrescu and Hurlin causality analysis shows that globalization Granger causes CO 2 emissions. Globalization also causes financial development and energy intensity. A feedback effect exists between financial development and CO 2 emissions. Furthermore, financial development causes economic growth but similar is not true from opposite-side in Granger sense. Finally, this study presents important policy implications with respect to APEC countries. Image 1 • This study examines the effects of globalization and financial development on CO 2 emissions. • The data of APEC countries has been used. • Westerlund Cointegration approach used to find panel cointegration while CUP-FM and CUP-BC used to find long run relationships. • Globalization and financial development reduce the CO2 emissions both in long run and short run. • Policies to increase green energy and improved technology are recommended, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can mitigating only particle mass, as the existing air quality measures do, ultimately lead to reduction in ultrafine particles (UFP)? The aim of this study was to provide a broader urban perspective on the relationship between UFP, measured in terms of particle number concentration (PNC) and PM 2.5 (mass concentration of particles with aerodynamic diameter < 2.5 μm) and factors that influence their concentrations. Hourly average PNC and PM 2.5 were acquired from 10 cities located in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia over a 12-month period. A pairwise comparison of the mean difference and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test with the application of bootstrapping were performed for each city. Diurnal and seasonal trends were obtained using a generalized additive model (GAM). The particle number to mass concentration ratios and the Pearson's correlation coefficient were calculated to elucidate the nature of the relationship between these two metrics. Results show that the annual mean concentrations ranged from 8.0 × 103 to 19.5 × 103 particles·cm−3 and from 7.0 to 65.8 μg·m−3 for PNC and PM 2.5 , respectively, with the data distributions generally skewed to the right, and with a wider spread for PNC. PNC showed a more distinct diurnal trend compared with PM 2.5 , attributed to the high contributions of UFP from vehicular emissions to PNC. The variation in both PNC and PM 2.5 due to seasonality is linked to the cities' geographical location and features. Clustering the cities based on annual median concentrations of both PNC and PM 2.5 demonstrated that a high PNC level does not lead to a high PM 2.5 , and vice versa. The particle number-to-mass ratio (in units of 109 particles·μg−1) ranged from 0.14 to 2.2, >1 for roadside sites and <1 for urban background sites with lower values for more polluted cities. The Pearson's r ranged from 0.09 to 0.64 for the log-transformed data, indicating generally poor linear correlation between PNC and PM 2.5. Therefore, PNC and PM 2.5 measurements are not representative of each other; and regulating PM 2.5 does little to reduce PNC. This highlights the need to establish regulatory approaches and control measures to address the impacts of elevated UFP concentrations, especially in urban areas, considering their potential health risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to consider the promise and problems of the globalization of research for nurses and other healthcare professionals. Over the past decade, there has been an impressive increase in research activity in many regions of the world, such as in several of the Asian countries. This increasing capacity to conduct research and create innovations has great promise for shared health, prosperity, and well-being, but it also has some significant problems and limitations that are often not reported. One area of research that has drawn considerable international research attention is aging and longevity. In the United States, there is much to learn from the work of international colleagues in terms of clinical application; it is unclear how generalizable the findings are or, in other words, what may be lost in translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines key transformations in the development of higher education in the countries of Central Asia, conditioned by the processes of globalization. The study reveals the general tendencies of the modernization of higher education in Central Asian countries: the restructuring of the university system, the expansion of the mechanisms for assessing and monitoring the activities of higher education institutions, the practical orientation of education, the expansion of the network interaction of higher education institutions and the formation of university associations, the internationalization of educational activity, the virtualization of the educational process. In conclusion, the main problems of cooperation in the formation of the educational landscape of the Central Asian countries are considered and ways of their solution are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Southeast and South Asia are home to one-third of the world's population. Their great economic and cultural diversity makes generalization about family patterns and trends hazardous. We review literature on trends in fertility, marriage, divorce, and living arrangements in the past half century. The explanations for these trends focus on structural and ideological changes related to socioeconomic development; cultural factors including kinship system, religion, and ethnicity; and public policies. While the impact of rapid modernization and related ideational changes are evident, there are also changes—or a lack thereof—that cannot be explained by development and may be attributable to historical and cultural factors that have shaped family norms in the region. The following trends are evident: (a) fertility is declining and age at marriage is rising, although teenage and arranged marriages remain common in South Asia, (b) a majority of the elderly continue to live with or are supported by their children, and (c) divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing remain relatively rare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Despite the fact that some studies examine the role of cultural attributes as determinants of successful alliance relationships, there has been lack of studies that explored how a firm's orientation toward alliances, as a culture, might provide competitive advantages in the form of alliance relationship, which influences the firm's performance. The current study therefore proposes a research model, in which alliance orientation as an intangible resource enhances the alliance relationship advantage, which eventually improves alliance performance, with national culture as a moderator. Design/methodology/approach: To test the hypotheses, responses were obtained from 145 South Korean and 123 Chinese firm samples. The proposed model was estimated using structural equation modeling and hierarchical regression analysis. Findings: The empirical study confirms that alliance orientation directly influences alliance relationship advantage, en route to alliance performance. When uncertainty avoidance is greater, the relationship between alliance relationship advantage and alliance performance grows weaker, whereas when masculinity and long-term orientation are greater, this relationship becomes enhanced. Research implications: Leveraging source-positional advantage-performance structures (Day and Wensley 1988), this study clarifies how alliance orientation influences a firm's alliance relationship advantage as a positional advantage, which eventually enhances its alliance performance. Moderating effects of cultural factors arise between alliance orientation and alliance relationship advantage, thereby revealing the important, contingent role of cultural factors in managing the link between alliance orientations and competitive advantage. Practical implications: This study provides managerial guidelines for how firms operating in different countries such as Korea and China can manage their alliance orientation and alliancerelated activities to enhance their competitive advantages and firm performance, by noting and accommodating different cultural characteristics. Originality/value/contribution: The proposed contingency model relies on the moderating role of national culture, reflected by uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and long-term orientation, to explain the relationships between alliance competitive advantages and alliance performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay proposes that the study of Asia, thought of as an Inter-Asian space, can provide concepts that shed light on the social shapes of societies that are mobile, spatially expansive, and interactive with one other. Inter-Asia, an old world crisscrossed by interactions between parts that have known and recognized one another for centuries, provides an unmatched depth and breadth of mobile experience and material. Such material can be recognized if seen through concepts designed to bring out the shapes of mobile societies, and to analyze their dynamics. These concepts includemobility, disaggregation-reaggregation, connection, circulation, partial societies, transregional axis/intermediate scale, and outside-in analysis. They are offered in the spirit of philosophical housekeeping, to clarify and crystalize what is innovative about recent Asian studies that move beyond globalization, and to further those efforts.They areways out of the box of classical social theory’s internalist, constitutionalist paradigms that hamper the Inter-Asia venture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much research has been undertaken on firms' internationalisation, much less has been written on internationalisation's other side, localisation. Yet with the rise of emerging economies, especially Chinese transnational corporations, localisation has become an increasingly significant. This article examines the localisation experience of two Chinese telecommunications enterprises - Huawei and ZTE - in Malaysia. By holding these factors constant (the ceteris paribus assumption), several dimensions of localisation are revealed. They are product, workforce, technology, organisation and management. Firm-specific factors matter both in accounting for inter-firm similarities and differences in the manner they localised. Enterprise ownership is also important in explaining firm performance and host countries' perception of these firms. Leadership styles of these enterprises' founders also matter. Together, these factors affect the differential pace of firms' internationalisation and localisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across Asia, the pursuit of national and global capital accumulation has relied on flexible, feminised work forces and patriarchal models of social reproduction. These gendered patterns of production and reproduction, while central to Asia's neoliberal 'miracle' economies, have also generated powerful discourses that devalue women and their work. Drawing on case studies from across the region, this paper examines the links between these globalising dynamics and provocative local depictions of Asian women as active, desiring, and immoral. These 'gendered morality tales' reveal the complex cultural and ideological work that sustains neoliberal models of national economic development. At the same time, these moralising narratives offer insight into the localised negotiations through which marginalised and gendered citizens confront their subordination within the region's hierarchically ordered political economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the scholarship around the workings of education policy has focused on the global West and has taken for granted the state's limited abilities in the control of policies as both text and discourse. Drawing upon policy texts from the Singapore Ministry of Education and ethnographic data collected in a Singapore school, this paper explores the enlarged but by no means unproblematic role of strong states and their provision and regulation of education policy in Asia. The paper begins by providing an overview of the major emphases and research trajectories taken up by the field of education policy. This is followed by an elaborated account of the nature and politics of the strong state in Asia in general and particularly in Singapore. These theoretical and contextual remarks then pave the way for a closer look at how the Singapore state functions as a major mediator and recontextualizing agent of education policy. The discussion foregrounds the enlarged role of the state in prescribing, translating, and regulating how a national curriculum policy on critical thinking finds its way into the practice of local schools and classrooms. The paper concludes with a number of remarks on the deparochialization of research and how recent work on 'Asia as method' may provide a fortuitous approach to critiquing hegemonic systems of knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western law is a bundle of systematic, comprehensive rules based on, first, modern Western states’ legal systems; second, constitutionalism based on liberal democracy; third, capitalist market economies based on individual freedom; fourth, the Roman law tradition; and, fifth, Christian ethics. By contrast, in many cases, non-Western law has no elaborate or solid structure based on a special mechanism, and it is not clear-cut in such a way as to clearly demark the boundary between lawfulness and unlawfulness; rather, it is flexible. Non-Western law is also referred to as customary law, and other such names. Thus, “law,” as used in the sense of non-Western law, is a cultural hybrid, and thus it is impossible to accurately understand non-Western law by using the standards for lawfulness and unlawfulness employed in the study of Western law. In this paper, I will focus on the Chinese-style of the “rule of law” through analyzing and classifying views on “rule of law” in Chinese legal academic circles and discuss the issues surrounding the “identity postulate of a legal culture” in Asian law in the face of globalization by describing the problem caused by blending Western law with non-Western law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including the characteristics of Asian multinational firms, the factors influencing precocity in terms of technology intensive firms in India, and born global forms and the concept of guanxi.

In the context of globalisation, higher education institutions not only have to be global in their internal practices, but also have to appear as international hubs to their constituencies. International partnership has been an essential part of these strategies. Partnerships help institutions in creating practices that are costly, as well as enhancing reputation by partnering with prestigious schools. Moreover, different spectrums of partnerships require varying degrees of commitment. Noting that the motivation for and engagement in partnerships is particularly strong in business, and the region of Latin America as well as Asia and Oceania, this study attempts to depict how institutions engage internationalisation, revealed as the exchange network and dual degree network of the 20 best MBA programmes in the two regions. Employing social network analysis, we found that schools have different levels of engagement in building partnerships and the region and reputation of schools matter for partnerships. Top-ranked MBA programmes tend to have more exchange partners and have a higher level of popularity in the exchange network. The dual degree network was more restricted in terms of the number, country, and prestige. Asian and Oceanian MBA programmes tend to have more exchange partners but are less likely to engage in dual degree partnerships, compared to the Latin American MBA programmes. Some institutions focus their dual degree network on a particular region. As higher education institutions actively engage in various types of collaborations, the findings provide meaningful implications for understanding the patterns of international partnership among higher education institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks what insights the literature provides on divergence versus convergence of innovation paths in Europe and Asia. It contrasts the abundant literature on determinants of innovation paths with the scarcity of studies that are explicitly comparative across countries or continents. Implicit conclusions however emerge from several lines of work including evolutionary perspectives which stress differences in national conditions, and other perspectives which stress latecomer and globalisation effects. This paper distils and draws together the main conclusions on why innovation paths can be expected to diverge or converge. Its contribution lies in spelling out and bringing together implicit and explicit insights from a wide range of literatures. It also provides an analytical backdrop for some of the other papers in this special issue of Science and Public Policy which provide comparative empirical analyses of low carbon innovation paths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As East Asians are, on average, less happy than those in economically developed Western nations, more insights regarding the associations between work, income and happiness are needed. This study analyzes data from the 2010 East Asian Social Survey to investigate these associations in China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, and is framed in a similar context as previous studies that utilize data from Western nations and through the lens of social comparison theory. Path analysis is used to model the associations between happiness and its predictors while taking correlations between the predictors into account. Results show that working hours are negatively associated with happiness in China, Japan and Taiwan, but such an association is not observed in South Korea. At the same time, relative income is significantly associated with happiness in all four East Asian nations, but it only mediates the association between working hours and happiness in China. These results suggest that careful consideration of economic and labour policies are critical to promote the happiness of East Asian workers. Findings from this study are useful for further inquiries with regard to specific explanatory factors of the associations between working hours, relative income and happiness in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing body of research on family relationships and the nature of family violence in Muslim-majority countries of Asia. However, patterns and trends around family dynamics and violence do not remain static. Despite the diversity of South Asian societies, all are being influenced by a constellation of globalized social, economic, political and religious forces that manifest in unique ways in different contexts. To date, there is little written about the implications for women's rights and gendered violence when globalization remolds religious, cultural, geographic and other social realities. This critical review presents a review of feminist literature on gender, family and violence in Asian Muslim-majority countries - notably Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh - from a feminist globalization theoretical perspective. The article uses the Maldives as a case study to map how globalized socio-economic and political trends are changing the terrain of family and society in ways that both advance and retract women's rights and contribute to their increased risk of violence. This paper advances the literature on feminist perspectives on family relationships by demonstrating the importance of considering localized problems within a global sphere. This approach will allow researchers to systematically assess the influence of global processes on changing family relations and implications for family structures. The paper concludes with applications for feminist approaches to globalization, gender and violence. In particular, an increased focus on global processes and the shifting dynamics of family relationships will better inform global feminist activism, and feminist activism in Asian Islamic communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the authors of this introduction, home is not always or only sweet home. For us, it is constructed with contradictions, ruptures and anxieties. Indeed, the world never fails to present us with ‘real’ people with ‘real’ issues of home. After ‘rescuing’ the idea of home from its two assumed arch-enemies ‘mobility’ and ‘urbanization’, we will proceed to formulate our appeal to reconceptualize ‘home’ and explicate why and how to do so. We have cited instances from Hong Kong, Beijing and Asia at large, not only because the empirical core of this special issue is on Asia, but, more fundamentally, also because we want to take issue with the Eurocentric bias in the debates on home hitherto. We conclude by making a modest plea – or more accurately, to configure various trajectories of thinking on ‘home’ into a plea – to bracket home as (making) place, (not) belonging and (flexible) citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A post–World War II Japanese business model has changed the cultural production of capitalism globally. Instead of a drive for uniformity, difference is a resource for the supply chains that have come to dominate Asia—and the world. This article offers a pocket history of the model's emergence and explores its implications for the (non)management of labor and natural resources. Heterogeneity and ruin intertwine in the making of supply chain pockets of political economy. Supply chains link precarity and prosperity, as well as varied cosmologies and ways of life, creating difference-in-connection. What we know as Asia reemerges within the linked niches and nodes of supply chains in which all kinds of difference matter and in which, indeed, global connection flourishes through structures for making and maintaining difference. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Does the internationalisation of Asian higher education give preference to Western faculty members, especially against the backdrop of internationalisation trends that call for an importation of Western pedagogical practices, ideas, and standards? This article seeks to complicate such a claim through close examination of the Western faculty members who work at a Korean university. In particular, this study reveals the systematic disempowerment of Western faculty members, which eventually leads to Western faculty members’ mass departure from South Korea. The ephemeral and transitional quality of the Western faulty members is what renders them even more helpless and commoditised for the benefit of a Korean university while the institution maintains the façade of internationalisation via the large-scale recruitment of Western faculty members by perpetually replacing those who leave with new recruits. Such a phenomenon exposes complexities within the internationalisation process that have yet to be addressed by scholars of education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This review article discusses the ‘translation of Asian modes of healing and medicine’ in six recently published books by raising seven questions. They serve both to review the volumes and to ask how we have moved from understanding systems of healing in terms of tradition and modernity, science and nonscience, globalization and locality, innovation and cultural heritage, to translating them in terms of assemblages, products, modes of resistance, social (dis-)harmony, and ecological balance. The questions span subjects ranging from the meaning of ‘Asian’ in Asian modes of healing, the object of healing and classifications of systems of healing to their relation with ‘biomedicine,’ modernization and the state, the extents to which communities share healing tradition, and their existential meaning in context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper contributes to the debate on globalization and the great divergence with a comprehensive analysis of the integration of Asia in the world market from 1800 to the eve of World War II. We examine the patterns of convergence in prices for a wide range of commodities between Europe and the main Asian countries (India, Indonesia, Japan and China) and we compare them with convergence between Europe and the East Coast of the United States, hitherto the yardstick for the 19th century. Most price convergence occurred before 1870, mainly as a consequence of the abolition of the European trading monopolies with Asia, and, to a lesser extent, the repeal of duties on Atlantic trade. After 1870, price differentials continued to decline thanks to falling freights and to better communication after the lay-out of telegraph cables. There was only little disintegration in the inter-war years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates Kazakhstan's natural resource policies and their impact on the standard of living of the Kazakhstan population within the framework of three determinative factors: globalization and international markets; Soviet legacy and ‘resource nationalism’; and Nursultan Nazarbayev and his authoritarian leadership. It argues that natural resource policies of Kazakhstan failed to improve the living standards of the majority of people in Kazakhstan, especially the poor and those living in oil-producing and rural areas, despite increasing oil prices and revenues. The argument will be supported with an analysis of Kazakhstan's oil wealth distribution in light of global initiatives as well as with evidence derived from official reports and statistical data to find out whether Nazarbayev's widely discussed ‘resource nationalism’ is ‘nationalistic’ enough to favour the whole nation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores television landscapes in Asia two decades after the introduction of satellite television in the region. Exploring both past trends and emergent logics, it argues that whereas nation-states in Asia originally saw foreign, particularly Western, media flows as an existential threat to local culture and identity, and sought to limit them via a variety of gatekeeping mechanisms, the contemporary situation is very different. Indeed, television landscapes all over the continent are generally tilting toward greater openness and greater integration with the global television system, the discursive decline of the idea of media imperialism, and the rise of market-oriented media models, in many cases sponsored by states themselves, all over the continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are currently experiencing a global revolution in Christian higher education. As chronicled in Carpenter, Glanzer, and Lantinga's 2014 volume titledChristian Higher Education: A Global Reconnaissance, Christian universities are expanding rapidly around the globe. My institution, Cornerstone University, has been involved in this phenomenon by developing international partnerships and expanding our educational presence in Asia. Our involvement has led me to participate in two recent international educational ventures, one a faculty/staff workshop on faith integration at Uganda Christian University, and the other a one-week course in church history for pastors and Christian professionals in Delhi, India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a Westerner's perspective of the place of people with a disability in Asian society, there are similarities and differences between the two societies. A major problem for the Asian countries is their lack of reliable disability prevalence data. The stigmatization of people with a disability remains an international problem and is not confined to Asian cultures. It is argued that the environmental contexts of a culture need to be explored before making generalisations about a culture's attitudes towards people experiencing a disability. Differences between social policies toward disadvantaged groups are explored with reference to economic rationalist policies, utilitarian individualism, materialism, and the potential moral challenges presented by new genetic discoveries. The rise of globalisation and its potential impact upon traditional Asian cultures is explored. The concluding analysis examines developments in disability legislation, support services and the development of a local disability research capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have pointed to the central role played by English as the language of international reach in the strategies of globalising universities, as seen in the provision of English language programmes such as language boot camps for international students in western universities as well as academic programmes in English in non-English speaking countries in order to attract international students unwilling to learn the local language. Indeed, the study of English is almost concomitant with a ‘global curriculum' and proficiency in English has also been considered an important component of global literacy skills. Using two contrasting case studies – The University of Tokyo and the National University of Singapore – and by drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data, this paper examines the discourses and debates around the place of English in a globalising university, giving attention to the paradoxes and tensions embedded in language policy. It also explores the ways in which international students at both universities cope with (un)familiar language environments and deal with language barriers in the universities where they are enrolled. The paper aims to deepen the understanding of the everyday politics of language that international students confront, and the strategies they employ in negotiating these encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking at the South Korean case of New Songdo City and comparing it with two Chinese cities, the Yujiapu Financial District and Lingang New City, this study examines practices of city building in Northeast Asia not simply from an ambitious urban design aspect, but more critically from the planning patterns and emphatic discourses employed in these developments. Designed by top-down decisions to reach the ocean coast from the centres of the metropolitan region, New Songdo City drew upon the Global City paradigm that employs comprehensive modernist urban plans, while city developers aspired it to be a strategically positioned, new urban gate to its metropolitan region. Similar ambitions feed the creation of Yujiapu and Lingang and are coloured by a competitive developmental agenda of catching up the West on the one hand and surpassing regional rival cities on the other hand. These South Korean and Chinese examples stand as emblematic instances of how the currency of global city development is now articulated through popular planning discourses like ecologically conscious and technologically advanced urbanism. Framed as Green City Development, the three new cities reveal narrowly tailored global themes of sustainability and intelligence that address the current modes of imagining urban space in Northeast Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Inspired by the ‘rise of Asia’ in academia, this article explores the question of academic publics: who are we addressing in our writing and teaching? With the increasing globalisation of academic life, the global rise of the neoliberal university and, as Latour puts it, ‘critique running out of steam’ in the West, the question of academic publics becomes increasingly pressing, especially for cultural studies. This article proposes that transnational academic encounters may offer a way out of the crisis of critique and a transnational ethics of scholarly virtues, stressing the personal predispositions and concomitant practices that shape the distinct quality of academic inquiry. It highlights five main academic virtues: doubt, systematic analysis, realism, complexity and slowness. Of these five virtues, doubt (of oneself) is the central academic virtue: it should take center stage in university teaching, academic writing and in academic forays into the public and the transnational spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]