As countries across Asia continue to rise and become more assertive global powers, the role that Higher Education has played, and continues to play, in this process is an issue of growing pertinence. Furthermore, understanding the relationship between Europe and Asia fostered by historical and contemporary knowledge transfer, including Higher Education, is crucial to analysing and encouraging the progress of both regional integration and inter-regional cooperation.
With a specific focus on international Higher Education, European Studies in Asia investigates knowledge transfer and channels of learning between Europe and Asia from historical, contemporary and teaching perspectives. The book examines a selection of significant historical precedents of intellectual dialogue between the two regions and, in turn, explores contemporary cross-regional discourses both inside and outside of the official frameworks of the European Union (EU) and the Asia--Europe Meetings (ASEM). Drawing on extensive case studies based on many of his own teaching experiences, Georg Wiessala addresses key questions, such as the nature and construction of the European Studies in Asia curriculum; aspects of ‘values’, co-constructed learning and adult pedagogy in the discipline of European Studies in Asia; the politics of Asian host cultures, the ‘internationalization’ of Asian Higher Education and the experiences and expectations of tertiary sector students of this subject in Asia, Australia and New Zealand. In doing so, the author articulates a range of outcomes for the further development of Higher Education cooperation agendas between Asia and Europe, in the discipline of European Studies, and in related fields such as International Relations.
This case study-led book makes an original and novel contribution to our understanding of European Studies in Asia. As such, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of Asian Education, Comparative Education, European Studies and International Relations.
1. The Globalization of Knowledge And the Subject of European Studies in Asia 2. An Ocean of Emptiness and a Steppe in Time: Central Eurasia and the Geography of Knowledge along the Silk Roads 3. Hearts and Souls - Silver and Spice- Missionaries and Mandarins: Portuguese Knowledge-Management and Jesuit Missionary Enterprise in Asia 4. Finding Europe in Nagasaki and Ayutthaya: The Japanese Leonardo and the Siamese Falcon 5. Travels of the Mind: Exhibitions, Websites and Public Events connecting with European Studies in Asia 6. Contemporary Actors, Networks and Institutions in the European Studies in Asia Discipline: Co-Constructed Curriculum Leadership and Higher Education Regionalism 7. Teaching Comparative Regionalism and the EU in South East Asia: ‘Sons of the Soil’, Student Politics and European Studies in Malaysia 8. The Art of Good Feng Shui in Brussels: Taking European Studies in Asia to the Capital of Europe, 2002-2012 9. "Between Vladivostok and Africa" - Teaching and Debating EU Studies in New Zealand and Australia, 1999-2014 10. Overall Conclusions
Biography
Georg Wiessala is Deputy Director and Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Educational Leadership, University of Malaya, Malaysia.
"For educators, Wiessala’s work is a much more valuable resource that provides them with concrete examples based on the author’s life-long experience as an educator in Europe and Asia and with a densely annotated summary of the long-standing history of people bridging cultures at both ends of the Eurasian continent." - Frederik Vermote McLintock, California State University, Fresno, Journal of Jesuit Studies 3 (2016) 279-368
