“Global Asia major, fostering our students Asia literacy and awareness of the diversity of

experiences, people, and histories in Asian societies and their own

to become a responsible and ethical citizen in the world “

—— What is the historical background of establishing Global Asia at Monash University?

“I am not sure how familiar everybody is with Australia, and with the long-running debates we have in Australia about whether Australia is in Asia or not and how and in what context, etc. There is in fact a really long history of regional studies. So Asian studies has a long history. The way in which Asian studies is conceived really depends on different universities. Sometimes it is actually a collection of study of Japan and China and Thailand or else, just separately but in a group called Asian studies. And then, more rarely, it is a kind of cross-Asia type of connections of interest. But at the same time, as there is always been this interest in Asian studies, there is always been arguments about whether there is such a discipline as Asian studies, just because it is regions that doesn’t mean actually a kind of theoretical discipline, etc.

     If we are going to look at the story of Asian studies in Australia, it is constant that we need Asian studies. Because we are still very much dominated by an Anglocentric culture, many of our students could do an entire degree without ever thinking about Asia or thinking about the position of Australia in the region and the connections we have. But, then the pushback is, you don’t have a discipline. I am a historian, my colleagues are anthropologists, sometimes linguists, etc. So, there is this constant back and forth between “yes, we need Asian studies”, “no, we don’t need Asian studies”, because we study Asia in the history discipline and in the linguistic discipline.

     So, what used to be Asian studies at Monash a few years ago, I have been at Monash a long time, but it was a separate major, a series of units that the students could take as part of their Bachelor of Arts. It then suffered from this moment of saying: there is no such thing as Asia; there is no such thing as Asian studies; Asian studies should be part of international studies, which was a very strong major. And, then gradually, Asia disappeared again from this international studies space, because there was a big focus on the other aspects of our culture, Europe, America, and so on. About five years ago, we then re-established a program and wanted to call it Global. We wanted to ensure that our students had a way to engage with Asia. And then the reason we called it Global Asia was because we wanted really to focus on the cross relationships between Asia and the rest of the world; the influences from Asia on to the world and then from the world on to Asia, because that really allows us maybe to think beyond national borders.

     That is the kind of history of it. Part of the reason why I was successful in managing an argument that we needed this major was that we have a very strong group in this university of scholars who work on Asia in different schools and in different places, and that we have also got a really strong series of big holdings in our central library on Southeast Asia literature and materials, but also Japanese, Korean, and Chinese materials. So with all of that, it was a no-brainer to allow our students to really focus on Asia from first year onwards.

     We also have four Asian language majors. We teach Indonesian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, and Japanese and Chinese are the biggest programs. We have a thousand first-year students in Japanese. They are not all going to continue, but that is a big program. Chinese is second and Korean is very rapidly increasing. So another key reason for establishing this major, again, was to ensure that our language major students have the opportunity to gain study skills, research skills, essay writing skills in units where they might not be able to do that in language units.”

—— As a follow up question, why these four languages? We have checked your website, and it says six countries, China, Japan, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, and South Asia. So, why do you focus on these areas?

“It is historical in the sense that, again, Australia’s interest in teaching our students, teaching the Australian citizens about countries, depends very much and changes. In the early 90s, we discovered Japan. We had already discovered Japan, but suddenly we started teaching Japanese. So again, backtracking, Australia, as you know, it has a long history of being quite a kind of state Anglo-Saxon. We taught children languages like French and Italian because those are what people used to learn in England. Then suddenly there was a turn towards Asia, and we started teaching Japanese, Chinese, and Indonesian at primary school, then at secondary school, and then we got this massive influx of people who learned it at university as well. I learned Japanese in that moment, too.

     So, universities are kind of the inheritors of four languages. Indonesia is very small in terms of enrollment, but there is a very good reason why we want to improve our engagement with Indonesia as a country. So, we want more and more people to be more fluent in Indonesian, etc. We have less trouble filling seats for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. There is a lot of interest, I think, particularly in Japanese and Korean forms of pop culture. Our students love all that cultural forms and want to learn languages for that, which is great. South Asia is a smaller aspect of our interests, so we don’t teach any South Asian languages.

     But, over the last five years, the migration patterns to Australia have changed. So, we may, in due time, start thinking about teaching some of the South Asian languages of the communities in Australia. Having said that, we have also got some fifty years of Vietnamese migration to Australia, and we haven’t managed to teach. There are one or two universities who teach Vietnamese at tertiary level. So, we are historically shaped, but also shaped by budgets, of course, like every institution. We can’t teach smaller groups, unless there is a good reason. We are maintaining that reason for Indonesian studies. We do have another campus in Malaysia, so we kind of connect with that as well. Because those are the languages we teach, those are the scholars that we keep appointing, and therefore those are the areas of scholarships that these scholars are happy to teach. I wish we could be more responsive, but it is really quite difficult to establish new streams.”

—— Thank you so much. So, the dependencies to the foreign countries, the migrants, the popularities of culture, and also the budget have influenced.

“And the connections with primary and secondary schools, with other areas of schooling that obviously we also need to follow through. We teach all our Asian languages from the beginning, but we also teach those who have done Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian at high school, and wish them to continue. And, occasionally we say, we should teach Vietnamese and Hindi, but then it is very difficult to find where our students would come from, and how that would fit with our existing commitments.”

—— We would like to ask the second question, which is related to what you just answered. What do you consider as the main missions of your program?

“The main mission is to shape awareness of the diversity of experiences and societies in Asian countries for our students. I would love every Australian student to feel comfortable about understanding history, societies, cultures, but in all their diversities as well. That is a key mission for this major, and to create the people who will come after, to increase scholarship on Asia, to create good researchers.

     And because that is a key mission of our major, we have also embedded in this major the kind of study skills that are not immediately relevant to Global Asia. Because we had the chance to establish a major from scratch, we were also really thinking about that kind of authentic assessments for students to create mini research projects. For example, in our first-year unit, our students do a mini research project, and they hear from researchers and read, and then they listen to our own researchers talking about the ways in which they use sources to create arguments. In our second year, our students have to focus on reading academic articles and understanding how research is made, and then in their third year, they do their own bigger research projects.

     So, on the one hand, it is about teaching students how to think about Asian societies in all their diversity and to question the ways in which they relate to each other, how these societies relate to the world, how they influence each other at different times, etc. So, we go through the really big themes, imperialism, colonialism, gender issues, revolutions, and we do all of that. But we also do a lot of how do we know the world, how do we read about knowledge, and how do we produce knowledge. So there are these two streams.”

—— What about if the students don’t aim to grow up into a researcher? Why do you think they still need to understand Asia?

“There are two reasons for that. I know that not all of my students are going to be university researchers, but they still need those skills. But, why do they need to understand about Asia? Partly because our society is so fundamentally shaped, and has been for a long time, by relations with Asian countries and people at different times; even before white colonialists came to Australia, Indigenous peoples of the North had relations with Indonesian peoples, etc. So, we are doing that for a broad thinking around what the history of our relationship has been, but also to get our students to an awareness of their own society.

     Until very recently, even until 2022, if you looked at the Australian Parliament, it was a sea of old white guys. We have had the election about two years ago, which changed that a little bit. So, there are a lot more women and a bit more diversity. But still, our governments, our parliaments, don’t reflect the diversity of the lived experience of our students as they walk through their communities. They know, actually, there are all these kinds of people here. They are not on my TV just yet. They are not on the parliament just yet. I can’t hear them so much on the radio, but I engage with that on the internet, etc. So, in a sense, we want to give the students an understanding of their own society in Australia, but then also of the world more broadly, of how can we understand this world without understanding all the ways in which Asian peoples and Asian societies have influenced art, culture, ideas, philosophies, and so on, and of how other parts of the world have really shaped Asian societies with legacies that are ongoing and that are often quite terrible.

     So, it is really important for our students to be well educated, both to understand their own society and to understand the world, and Asian studies is really crucial for that in Australia, because our community is representative of these many trajectories. I think the purpose of a university is to make students think and to get them to understand why they think the way they think and to be able to check themselves, in other words, critical thinking skills. You don’t have to continue doing Asian studies into aPhD, but I need students to be able to look at the world and ask; “why is this like this?”, “Why is this politician talking about these people like this?”, “Is this OK? No, it’s not OK”, or, “how do I read this novel written by a Chinese Australian from Brisbane who is queer?”, “Where do I fit that in?”, and to check themselves when they are travelling, as they will. Everyone is very mobile now. Travelling to Asia, understanding the need to listen and to watch and to see and to reflect rather than already knowing everything. I don’t need them to all become researchers, but I would like them all to keep the critical thinking mindset, as this is a key way to be a responsible, ethical citizen in the world.”

—— Thank you so much. That was a very impressive answer. We also noticed in your website, maybe related to what you just answered, the term “Asia Literacy.”

“When we talk about literacy, both in narrow terms but also in more global terms [meaning] how can you read, and certainly in Australia [it means] the notion that you have an understanding of these things. So, again, I think the history of Australia has shaped the way in which we think about that, because, as you know, Australia had a very complex relationship with Asia at various times. We used to have a white Australia policy and still have a lot of racism and a lot of assumptions made about other cultures, not just Asian cultures. So giving students literacy is also about being reflective of their own understanding of what they think they know, so being literate in just really understanding the diversity. We always talk about Asia in Australia, but of course there is no Asia. But where is the geographical boundary? There is no geography. Where does it stop? If you are in England, you might think it stops in Iran. If you are in Australia, we often don’t think, for example, of India as Asia. We immediately go that is South Asia.

     So, getting students to think about “what is Asia”, it is a kind of ill-defined world region that is composed of nation-states that are in themselves all very complex. So, for example, you probably know that last year in Australia, we had a referendum on including an Aboriginal voice to parliament, which failed and it was very devastating. But, that was also a prompt for us to think about how we teach our students about the diversity of Asian societies. So, in my Global Asia first year class, just around the time we were having this referendum, and we all knew that it was likely to fail because of particular politics, I made my students read about the Japanese constitution and the attempts by Ainu people to be represented in the constitution in a different way. And, my students were saying things like, well, I had heard Ainu before, but I hadn’t connected Ainu with the problem of minority Indigenous groups that are semi-like what we have here. And, I was getting them also to read about farming practices in Hokkaido and the use of dogs and how these dogs then displaced the Japanese wolf, all that kind of things. And all my students were going, oh my God, it is exactly the same as what happened to Aboriginal people here. Displaced for pastoral reasons, their dogs are becoming wild dogs. These connections were really obvious to me but were obviously not there for them and they were able to gain it. So that kind of literacy of thinking, not about Japan as a homogenous population and where everyone looks like they live in Shibuya or something; Japan is a really complicated place with all kinds of complicated things. Some of them are the same or similar. Aging population, same thing here. Massively urbanised, in fact, same thing here.

     So, that is what I mean by literacy, being able to just know enough things to not make assumptions about what might come through in newspapers and the media. And when we talk about Indonesia in the media here, it is always in terms of crisis. It is about terrorism or drugs or some crisis. When we talk about Japan, we often talk about something quirky like, “oh, there’s a weird robot dog. Look at this crazy Japanese thing.” Instead of talking about all the normal things, all the ways in which break down our students’ assumptions that they might have got from the media is really crucial.”

—— That is also another impressive answer—learning about Asia to understand what they know and what they are, who they are. Let us move to the next question. So, what do you think differentiates Global Asia at Monash University from other Asian studies programs in other places, other universities?

“I think that the key difference is probably that focus on global trends. We are trying to tackle this massive area with this massive diversity of people, with this massive diversity of histories. What is the theme that can help our students to really understand sort of key elements? And then the global thing was really crucial. Also, the global Asia theme resonates with Australia in particular ways, because Australia is always affected by all of these trends. So we focus on what affects Asian societies and what has affected Asian societies, and then also how Asian societies have affected cultures outside of Asia, either through pop culture or bubble tea, or sushi rolls, or Buddhism, or all kinds of ways, or indeed the people who move out of Asia, such as Chinese gold diggers in Victorian gold fields or in American gold fields or Chinese textile workers in Italy. So, one focus is this kind of the relations-element.

     And I think the other is a piece of differentiation. And here I say I am not sure that nobody else is doing it, but what I am particularly proud of and keen to continue is this explicit focus on research; research skills and study skills. And maybe that is a particularly Monash thing because we have a mission also to enable students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to participate in tertiary education. And our schooling at secondary level can be quite patchy in some places. So, depending on the school you went to, you might come to university and you already know how to write, how to argue, how to read not basic things but academic material. But, a number of our students come to university with very limited skills on that. So they might have read a web page or maybe one novel, but they haven’t really had a chance to hone writing skills and argumentation skills. So, for me, it is really crucial to ensure that my students in this cohort are, no matter where they come from, able to gain the same skills as everyone else. I want my students to participate in the explicit nature of the skill and the explicit foregrounding of research as a key element of what universities do, or rather the producing of knowledge as a key element of what universities do.

     So, for example, I often walk into class, and I don’t say “hello students”, I say “hello colleagues.” And, the students are like, “where are the colleagues?” I just say, “you are my colleagues.” So, that kind of participation in the project of learning and knowing really explicitly to engage all our students. But I am sure there are other universities doing that as well.”

—— Related to your answers, we also noticed that your program is more focused on undergraduate education. We are curious why you don’t expand to graduate course or research clusters including research activities.

“That is partly because in Australian universities, masters by research and PhD programs don’t have classes. We are very much like one on one with our student plus supervision team plus conferences and so on. We don’t actually have formal classes for higher degree students, which I think is different, certainly to what my American colleagues say they do at home. Our students do classes, but they tend to be together with everyone else. And they can be just very much on conference presentation or work ethical things like that. We don’t have thematic classes, certainly not on Asian studies. So, our graduate coursework offerings at Monash are more vocational, that is, on areas such as tourism or applied linguistics or policy or sustainability in the environment. We don’t offer graduate coursework or very rarely on kind of really university type disciplinary topics. That is a bit of a trend of the moment, I think in Australian universities’ graduate coursework masters tend to be very much for further education for professional areas.

     I have got a number of former and current PhD students and master’s students working on Asian studies, but you probably wouldn’t see them from a program level. All of us supervise and encourage students to do Asian studies as part of their higher degrees, but it is not a formal coursework shape. And I can’t imagine that we would probably ever change that. We used to have a master’s in Asian studies a long time ago, but we had to stop it after we had no students for several years. And then one year, just one student. But for example, in our master’s of tourism and sustainable tourism management, there are a number of students from various parts of Asia or students who are studying parts of Asia. It is just that you don’t see “Asian” in the title.”

—— Thank you for your answers. Now that you mentioned about the students, we are also wondering the composition of your students. When we had an interview with, for example, a Canadian institute, the director mentioned that most of the students had some kind of histories of family origin related to Asia or so.

“That is a really interesting question. You probably also know that Australia exports education to a large degree. We have very large numbers of international student cohorts, mostly from China, also from Vietnam and Indonesia, particularly in those graduate coursework master’s that I just mentioned. But, for Global Asia, I have the best student mix ever. I have local, Anglo-Australians who often love anime or manga, J-pop, or they love K-pop and K-drama. So, they are already literate in some ways. There is the other Australian student cohort, which are people who are second or third generation Asian migrants to Australia. And then I have got international students, who often I think it may or may not be already familiar with Asian studies but find it difficult because they have to learn to read and write and think in English.

     The cohort of Asian legacy students is particularly interesting because I noticed in the last two years that it was the first time that I had Vietnamese legacy students in my classes. And, these students were really interested in the topic about the impact of Vietnamese refugees on Australian cultures. We watched together a film series. It was actually a slightly horror type of four series, Australian drama called Hungry Ghosts. It is about these four Vietnamese families and their cross-cultural trauma, I think cross-generational trauma. Nobody had seen it, even though it was created only recently. But my Vietnamese students were really interested in it and were able to reflect in ways that I hadn’t seen that kind of self-consciousness before.

     And, then I was talking to my colleagues about why is this the first time? Why have I never seen these students before? And my colleagues said, well, it is the first generation that is allowed by their parents to do something else than law or medicine. Because as you know, in migrant families, there is a massive push to do well. So, a lot of students had a lot of pressure to go into well-paying professional jobs, particularly in medicine or science. And yes, there is this change where their children are now free or just say, “I will do this different degree”, which is about humanities. And, it is amazing. So, I feel very lucky because I have been in this job for twenty years. Now, finally, I see this change.

     I think that is a group of Australians who have been here since the 70s and 80s. And of course, then we see the children and almost getting to be the grandchildren of Chinese students who came to Australia after the Tiananmen Square incident. And, then eventually we will have the children of Japanese and Korean working holiday visa who stayed here and got married. So, the student body is always changing. There are these three groups, I think, and they work together in interesting ways. We used to have a massive issue with Australian students and Asian students not talking to each other because Asian students equals international student, Australian student equals local white person. And none of this makes sense anymore. This is no longer true. Everything has changed, and that is cool.”

—— Thank you so much for providing us more context in the classroom. Maybe this is a follow up on that question, so when you created this program in the first place, why did you use the term Global Asia? Do you have any models from other universities in mind during that time? Why global Asia and how the term emerged?

“It was really important because of that earlier issue I talked about, which is the kind of ongoing fear and the constant concerns that we have that Asian studies is seen as a kind of vague, nonsensical, nondisciplinary area studies. And my argument was that if we focus on the global, if we focus on these kinds of influences in and out of Asia, then that removes that concern from perhaps other parts of the university that Asian studies means nothing, because it means everything. And so, the global part was an attempt to narrow down that theme for our students as well, and then to direct the way we teach in focusing especially on those moments of interaction. Because otherwise, where do you start and where do you finish? Even now, where do I start, where do I finish? I have got twelve weeks in a semester and there is never enough space. So, if we go, well, at least let’s limit that on those elements that make sense so that even though we might talk about the Philippine colonization one week and then the next week about the Boxer Rebellion and instead about the Meiji Constitution, if at least we are looking at these moments of connection, then there is a thematic spine to the program.

     So, it is a name that reflects a programmatic ideal as well as a broader kind of symbolic way of thinking about Asia. So, it was really quite programmatic about how we create something that makes sense and that also will not fall down if somebody says, “what is the meaning of Asian studies?”, just because we do have that long history of concern around that.”

—— That is very inspiring that you mentioned; by narrowing the theme, you can expand.

“Maybe. Trying to at least because it is really hard. Like, how do you decide what to teach students so that they don’t get overwhelmed by the amount because it is really difficult and they have many other units to do, right? So, this is just one of the wonderful topics that they might do in any semester. We are going to keep them on track, but also allow them to understand really big things. So, yes, it is tricky.”

—— Okay, let’s move to the next question, which is quite related to your answer. So, what do you think is the potentials or the constraints of this program?

“Well, the constraints is just the lack of time and space versus the great diversity of experiences in peoples, societies, concerns and of the region. So you are constantly making a choice, and that choice leaves out all the other options. For example, as one of the ways in the second-year unit where I teach my students to read academic materials, we decided to focus on what we call it Asia’s underside. We focus on violence, crime, and protest and on what happens when something goes wrong, as opposed to what things look like in an ideal world. What happens if some forms of violence occur? And that is a kind of theme that allows us to narrow down to ethnic tensions, corruption, and environmental disasters. That one is cross-Asia, but also cross discipline with the focus on them learning to read, and every student can choose to focus on a different country every week or on the same country. So, that is an attempt to limit and to manage the amount of information, again, by having a kind of general theme that runs through the unit. But the danger is always that you leave out all this other things. So you are constantly saying to students all the time, well, this is tiny little bit, and at least you are just learning about how to think about this, and you might be able to apply to someone else. So, those are the constraints.

     The opportunities are, I think, for students to constantly be able to connect issues across not just several Asian countries, but across societies across the world. We have just finished this one semester on Asia’s underside: Violence, crime, and protest, and I asked the students to reflect on what they had learned during the semester. Do you think differently about humanities now? What is that about? And, they were all saying, “well, we talked about Asia all semester, but really, we could have been talking about anywhere, like all human societies face all these kinds of problems.” And, that was a useful way for them to think about Asian societies being examples of human societies rather than this thing as Australians do sometimes, “oh, well, we can’t possibly understand Asia because they are all different.” So, I think that is the opportunity: to offer Asian ways to resolve world problems. We are not resolving problems, but at least to understand problems slightly different. It is very ambitious. But I have great students. They are pretty amazing.”

—— Please let us move to the next question. So, how do you evaluate the potential or the pitfalls of the concept “Global Asia” itself?

“That is an interesting question. I do not evaluate the outcomes in terms of my students’ skills as they come out, but those are skills related to their own ability to think rather than their ability to engage with Asia differently. And also, our programme is only about five years old. So maybe in time, when I have more alumni, I suppose I will evaluate the programme by considering what they did after. Currently, there is a former student on a new Colombo Plan scholarship, an Australian scholarship to do higher degree research in Japan. So this is a student who is really interested in gender studies and gender issues in Japan. I would like to imagine that some of my students might become teachers. So give me a few more years to figure out where my students have gone off to.

     What I do see is, whereas, in our Asian languages programs, we have good 2,000 students per year across different disciplines, I will have about 100 students doing the first year Global Asia unit and about 50 or 60 during the second year. Will they all major in it? I am not sure, because often they come from different programs and do this as an elective. But, I will keep an eye out on what my alumni do as they leave.”

—— Until now, do you think that the name of the program, Global Asia, is still the best name?

“I do think I want to keep it because of the way it helps us have a focus on Asia as part of the world, and Asian societies as being both transformed by and transforming the rest of the world. I think that is what “global Asia” helps us to focus on.”

—— Thank you, that is very clear. Do you have any more ambitions from now on? What is your outlook for this program?

“I would love to double the number of students doing Global Asia in the next couple of years. It would be fantastic to have more double degree students engaged. I have science students, IT students and engineering students, commerce students and law students, and I would like to have more of those students because they are a kind of secret weapon to transform societies, to embed that kind of knowledge in all kinds of places. So, when they graduate, they can change a few minds as well somewhere else. That is, at the moment, the limits of my ambition. Or, if I have more students doing Master’s and PhDs and continuing to study and going to Japan or China or Korea or Southeast Asia and studying there, that would be fabulous.

     Also, one of our key ambitions though is to integrate our Malaysia campus more effectively with our Australia campus and that can be a bit tricky because of the differences in degrees and so on. So, while I have Malaysia students coming to Monash Clayton in Melbourne and doing my units, I want my students to be able to do Malaysia units as well but it is often really tricky for students to move for one semester. So, one of our ambitions in the next two years is to enable online international learning, ensuring that the units that are taught in Malaysia can also be taken by our students here and finding a way to have our local students engage with the Malaysia students and learn from each other. So, that is the next project. We have a campus in Indonesia and China as well, but they tend to teach postgraduate level. So, eventually we might connect with those campuses as well but for now.”

—— Thank you so much. We have one more question. We understand the importance of you having a kind of cluster: a program called Global Asia is to put more emphasis on evaluating the impact of understanding Asia onto the other area or evaluating the influence of Asia on the globe or the global community onto Asia. Sometimes we observe some professors are more interested in doing research rather than teaching courses. We wonder whether other professors who are in the same cluster share the idea with yours, and let’s say, those who are studying about archaeology at the medieval age, they may not be so interested in putting emphasis on the global impact or Asian impact or something. But, we wonder whether you have any sessions or some meeting where you teach and share some ideas what to be taught in under the big umbrella, the concept of Global in Asia.

“I completely understand what you are saying because I think that there is a kind of institutional issue in universities across the world, and this is not just an Australian thing, where teaching or education is devalued vis-a-vis research. And, this is also a difficult topic here because it can go to promotion and to your career development. One of the changes that has occurred to me at Monash is that we actually take education just as seriously as research. And, we have key performance indicators for our education as well as our research and when people go for promotion the two are taken in equal ways. But, the culture takes a long time to change.

     So, we do have meetings for this cluster and there are always a lot more invitations than attendance. At the same time, the seven or eight colleagues are always there, and we are all pushing in the same direction, and to a great extent, some of my colleagues are more concerned by the lack of Asia literacy in Australian society and in the way our government funds or doesn’t fund the acquisition of Asian languages. So, they are even more activist than I am in ensuring that this program is where we keep pushing forward and saying “no, Asian studies matters, understanding Asia matters.”

     But, although all the invitations that go out to come and contribute, there is not always many people who come. We will see how we go, and I am hoping that by ensuring that when my colleagues publish something in an area of Asian studies and if I can fit a topic around that, and then I can get my colleague to talk to my students about their research and why they did it and “this is how you read my article, so I start with this and I did this, and I was having a problem with this element, etc”. I am hoping that this embedding of research into teaching might be a constant reminder that one can’t happen without the other. There is no point in researching if nobody is reading it and there is no point in teaching if it is not new and different research. But, that requires the willingness of colleagues to participate and I am just really lucky because I have got many really great colleagues who are always saying “oh yes I can do that, oh yes I can.””

—— We also agree. We are currently asking our colleagues to pay more attention to connectivity and to put it in a much broader context rather than looking at the separate state or village or the social group in a very isolated condition. It is worthwhile having a much broader view to think again why you are doing that kind of research, why your students need your knowledge. Thank you so much for spending one hour with us and for this insightful and inspiring conversation.

“Thank you so much.”