Interview #200—Tseen Khoo
by Leah Jing McIntosh
Dr Tseen Khoo is the founding convenor of the Asian Australian Studies Research Network (AASRN). Tseen is a senior lecturer in research education and development at La Trobe University, and a co-founder/manager of The Research Whisperer blog project.
She likes creating supportive, sharing communities and her current focus is on reducing inequities in academia.
Dr Tseen Khoo speaks to Leah Jing McIntosh about the history of Asian Australian activism, growing the Asian Australian Studies Research Network, and the joy of seeing Asian Australians become more politically and creatively visible.
Tseen, when I think of Liminal’s beginnings, the project feels so indebted to your tireless work in both academia and the arts, over the years. So, I want to begin this conversation by acknowledging this debt; thank you.
For me, making Liminal back in 2016 felt so urgent, but then I think about the Asian Australian Studies Research Network (AASRN), which you began decades earlier, making a space for Asian Australians must have felt even more so. How did it come about?
It’s hard to pin down a specific point of the network coming into being. As you flag, the advent of increasingly conservative, xenophobic politics that had built up by 1996—manifest most obviously in the growth of the One Nation party—was a big push for scholars interested in Asian Australian culture, politics, and communities to become more vocal and activated. The AASRN is a network created from distinctly activist imperatives. There was a significant momentum of research that was shared in 1999 with a watershed series of academic conferences that brought people together in a focused way to discuss topics around the politics of (anti-)racist representation, Asian Australian history and creative works, multiculturalism and Australian society, and heaps more. That year’s push was only made possible by our earlier colleagues’ work from decades beforehand, of course, and I think it’s important to acknowledge the critical pioneers who worked to create spaces for many of the discussions that we now take for granted as part of ‘Asian Australian Studies’.
When I was building my knowledge in this area and researching what Asian Australian material was out there, I found key guiding influences from the work of Ien Ang (Cultural Studies), Laksiri Jayasuriya (Sociology), Fazal Rizvi and Allan Luke (both from Education), Henry Chan (History), and Kam Louie (Asian Studies). Through my research degrees and into my research career, Jacquie Lo (Performance Studies) was a pioneering Asian Australian Studies colleague, mentor, and friend. It was both challenging and satisfying that there was such a breadth of areas across which this work happened, and I’m mindful that I come to this with a heavy Humanities lens and have not covered the significant work focused on Asian Australian cultures and communities that has taken place in disciplines such as public health, psychology, and social work.
As a network, the AASRN was founded formally in 2006 (with funding provided by International Centre of Excellence in Asia Pacific Studies [ICEAPS] at ANU). Many of its founding (and still current) members are visual artists, writers, performers, and cultural workers, as well as university scholars and community researchers. The blend of groups within its membership has always been a key strength of the network, and something that has made academics’ research more attentive to the role of scholarship within the broader Asian Australian community.
Can you speak to these activist imperatives? I feel that so often the relationship of this kind of work with ‘activism’ has the potential to be dismissed or weaponised—I’d love to know more about Asian Australia’s activist roots.
I’ve love to know more about these roots, too! I can only speak to the kinds of initiatives and actions I have seen around academia and in education more broadly as they’re the instances I know best. For example, activism from the Asian Australian Studies perspective can lie in rethinking and transforming what is taught as ‘Australian literature’ or ‘World literature’ kinds of units. Jacquie Lo wrote the essay ‘Reorienting Oz Lit and the English Curriculum’ as part of her work with the Asia Education Foundation, and I know of many colleagues who have rewritten curricula and advocated for Asian Australian texts (books, films, performance) to be part of subjects. I remember being so happy when Alice Pung’s anthology Growing up Asian in Australia was published and subsequently became part of school curricula and many university reading lists. These interventions make a big difference for those who teach the material and those who are learning.
Another good example of academic and grassroots community activism is the historical project The Real Face of White Australia (Kate Bagnall and Tim Sherratt), which aims to put faces and stories to the records of people who bore the brunt of Australia’s discriminatory immigration practices. The transcription of these records was a huge task and Bagnall and Sherratt ran ‘transcriba-thons’ that were open to interested members of the community to make progress on the work. An iteration of this project was run in Victoria, the Victorian CEDT Index (headed by Terry Young and Sophie Couchman, and in collaboration with CAFHOV), which was the Local History Project Award winner in the 2021 Victorian Community History Awards.
And I can’t help but keep offering a couple of other examples of fab researchers and their cross-community work: Indigo Willing and her skateboard activism and research, the Nikkei Australia crew and their projects around Japanese Australian communities and histories, and Ryan Gustafsson with his [LM1] community embedded and research-related podcasts (Call Me By My Name / Adopted Feels). I think it’s really important for researchers to engage more actively with public sphere platforms to ensure Asian Australian Studies research moves beyond paywalled scholarly outlets. An excellent example of this is Sukhmani Khorana’s recent writing for The Conversation about the 2022 federal election about how major parties continue to sideline ethnic representation.
These agitations for diversifying representation and informed critical work across communities extends to convening streams and participating in established conferences (e.g. Chinese Australian history at the Australian Historical Association; diasporic Asian studies at the Asian Studies Association of Australia; Asian Australian literature at the Association for Australian Literature). You could think of conferences as sites of intellectual ‘storming of barricades’, I suppose, and it’s where disciplinary turf wars can be played out, where topics are dismissed or invited, elided or centred. I’ve often been the lone Asian Australian paper on a panel or sometimes a whole event, and there would be interest from the audience but often limited engagement because most people haven’t read or seen what you’re talking about. Having an Asian Australian stream in a conference, while it sounds like a small thing, meant that there was some critical mass of fellow Asian Australian Studies researchers at the event—allowing for discussion on a richer level, without having to constantly justify why you are researching your topic at all. I was recently listening to an Academic Aunties podcast about being a racial minority scholar at humanities conferences and relating hard to too much of it. Sometimes, it can feel like a radical move to even turn up to events or conferences, because you know you’re going to have to run the gauntlet of being exoticised, or to have your work judged as ‘less than’ because research about the politics of representation is too often dismissed as mere identity politics and emptied of academic gravitas. It can feel like things are very slow to change in the academy, if at all.
Pre-social media, it was much harder to discern the momentum of Asian Australian Studies work and track who was doing what, or to collaborate across disciplines and locations to make things happen. I take it for granted these days and doing this interview with you has reminded me how intellectually and collegially lonely I was before AASRN cohered.
Liminal would exist in such a different way without such platforms, which allow community to come together with such ease. Looking back at the beginnings of the AASRN, to me this makes the formation of AASRN and its accomplishments even more astounding. What are you most proud of?
What I love best about AASRN is that it has had staying power and been influential for at least a couple of generations of scholars in the area now. It’s always hard to tell how long these kinds of networks will last because they are heavily dependent on members’ engagement and investment of time and usually have little material support. The fact that AASRN is over twenty years old (since its inception), and seeing it in the hands of a savvy, richly experienced executive committees, is something I am very grateful for, and of which I’m proud. Being able to hand the network over to someone like Mridula Chakraborty made it easy to step back in 2017 as I knew I could trust Mridula and the great crew on the committee to stay true to the spirit of the network while expanding its possibilities.
I feel so lucky that it exists. From experience, I know that this kind of work is hard to sustain without material support; what challenges have accompanied this work?
Personally, the most challenging thing with AASRN over time has been working to ensure its sustainability and independence. Networks are living things and need constant investment of ideas and energy to make it worthwhile for all. Because of the nature of the AASRN, and how its areas tended to fall between the cracks of more established scholarly fields (for example, Asian Studies and Australian Studies), it was difficult to retain momentum. Often, our graduating PhD researchers weren’t finding further opportunities in Australian universities to continue their work.
I have always been keen for the network to retain its independence as an organization, having seen other networks become embroiled in institutional politics that left them compromised. Following this path, however, meant that the network had to be creative when it came to generating resources and support for events, publications, and other kinds of projects. A necessary challenge for the network is the contestation around representation within the group, whether it’s along disciplinary lines, that of cultural communities, or on topics that are underrepresented or elided. For the most part, these have been points of constructive friction and the enthusiasm with which people engage in these discussions is indicative of the vitality of, and care within, the network.
In your position as the convener of the network, and in your own research, can you trace any changes in the way Asian Australians are positioned within what Anderson terms the ‘imagined community’?
The most wonderful thing for me is watching the Asian Australian community become more politically and creatively visible. It can feel like very small steps at times but the creative and scholarly activism that I’m seeing these days—in amplified ways, I suppose, given the platforms available to us now that weren’t before—is really nourishing and exciting. And one of the best aspects of it is that the work (creative and scholarly) is finding support and constructive debate with various Asian Australian audiences. As we know with trying to push for things to happen in the wider public spaces, it’s a combination of our persistence and energy alongside available opportunities and broader structural support.
These developments can take many different forms and the people and events that I especially appreciated in recent times include the many publications and op ed columns that offer Asian Australian voices significant national audiences (e.g. SBS Voices, Overland); focused radio series that enable deeper engagement with relevant topics (e.g. Sheila Pham and Masako Fukui’s series on multilingualism for ABC Radio National, Tongue Tied and Fluent); the growing portfolios of talented stalwarts like the fabulous Tony Ayres, Corrie Chen, and Ben Law, who have made space for Asian Australian talent in the screen industry; and the many stellar writers I have followed and whose work I share as much as possible—too many to name but if you read Liminal, you’ll know a lot of them already!
I’m having trouble answering this question because there is too much to say, too many people to name, and in many ways that’s a fantastic thing. Despite the very straitened times for Australian cultural communities, Asian Australian creative workers have gained traction across media and other contexts, from fronting national TV series (like Adam Liaw) and award-winning podcasts (like ‘Shoes Off’) to collaborative artist/community projects (e.g. Hyphenated Projects) and culture festivals (such as Annette Shun Wah directing Oz Asia).
This diversity of forms, and range of talent within those forms, is an absolute strength. I’ve seen folks get impatient about the fact that Asian Australians don’t always agree—and this is an attitude from Asian Australians themselves at times. I’d like to see people embrace the diversity of perspectives, talent, and expertise; have vigorous debates about the things we do; and tofind ways to stand in solidarity when it makes sense to do so. Identifying as ‘Asian Australian’ is most often a contingent and politically informed act.
The way you talk about community, especially in the context of the academy, is really refreshing, because you have such a strong focus on supporting others. Alongside the AASRN, you also started Research Whisperer — can you tell us more about this project?
Research Whisperer (RW) is a blogging and social media project that I started with my colleague Jonathan O’Donnell (University of Melbourne) that’s all about research cultures, finding funding, and the unwritten rules of academia. My drive in establishing the project, and continuing to manage it ten years later, is to provide collegial, supportive space for researchers around the world. I’ve seen how inequitable scholars’ contexts can be—if your institution doesn’t have the research culture and resources to help you build your academic career, you can feel stranded and helpless (not to mention bitter and twisted). This means those in more privileged, materially rich institutional spaces continue to reap the benefits of their position, while those in more toxic or poorly resourced sites can find it hard to get ahead. Academia in general has become more competitive, harsh, and precarious—and it’s heading into a period of extremely difficult circumstances.
In such difficult circumstances, what would you advise an early career researcher to do within this current, very exhausting, landscape?
What a time to be in higher education, right? I wish I had an upbeat way to look at all this but there isn’t really a good story here, not for quite a few years at least. It’s an undoubtedly tough time to be an academic and, for those who are newly graduated or graduating soon, it’s even more daunting.
My best advice pieces of advice at the moment are: know yourself and build those networks (and I don’t mean that in a cringe-inducing way because I hate those cliched notions of networking). Make sure you’re connecting to good people across a range of sectors. It’s definitely a time when having a Plan B and C for your career is necessary. Give yourself good choices by having clarity around what kind of work you really want to be doing—in or out of academia—and be proactive about creating pathways to these kinds of roles. A lot of folks I talk to, once they analyse what it is about academia they actually like, discover that these aspects can be found in other kinds of roles, potentially without the toxicity and unrealistic expectations of academia.
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Sara Ahmed, and reveling in the things that she says about the intractability of certain dynamics in higher education around the performance of diversity. This chimes so clearly with the things I’ve witnessed repeatedly. It’s so important to recognise the effects of these dynamics and structures, to have words for the complex and devaluing mechanics of racist institutions.
When I read Ahmed’s Complaint! (2021), I felt it in my body, this kind of visceral recognition… these frameworks for articulating the world feel like such a gift. Especially in this moment, I think, where both within the academy and more generally it’s been fairly exhausting. I’d love to know, how do you practise self-care?
It has taken quite a few years but I have now acknowledged that there’s only so much one person can do, and there’s no point burning out trying to be across everything. I now choose engagement with and participation in projects (or causes) more cautiously. I keep weekends and after-work hours clear for family and down-time, especially now I’m sole-parenting. This feels like I’m being ‘slack’ because for so many years I was very bad at having boundaries around the things I did. I am doing less overall, but I’d like to think that what I choose to focus on gets done well.
As someone who is very inspiring yourself—who do you look to for inspiration?
I’m constantly inspired by those who pursue their passions, make fantastic things happen, and do so by bringing people with them. For these reasons, I’m a die-hard Annette Shun Wah fangirl. I’ve followed her work and been an avid supporter of her projects since Performance 4A (now CAAP—Contemporary Asian Australian Performance). I find Annette particularly inspiring because her energy, generosity, and industry smarts are so strong. She is constantly finding ways to build dynamic, creative communities for the performing and cultural sectors, and particularly for Asian Australians.
And, finally, the Liminal question, and one I’m sure which has changed for you throughout the years—what does being Asian-Australian mean to you?
Being Asian Australian means that I think everyone has a responsibility in our society to address racism and inequity. It means that I am constantly aware of how people represent and talk to Asian groups and individuals—or not. And it means that, while there are often times I feel marginalised, overlooked, or dismissed, finding solidarity in political purpose with fellow Asian Australians is a constant gift.
Find out more
Asian Australian Research Studies Network
Interview by Leah Jing McIntosh
Illustrations by Viet-My Bui