Visions of a cosmopolitan, melting pot world, where races and cultures are blended and intermixed to produce hybrid cultures and ‘coffee coloured people’, are common in both popular culture and academic theorizing. Despite the theoretical messiness of the concept of race, ‘mixed race’ itself is an increasingly popular area of study in the social sciences, […]

Population aging in Asia has been testing and shaping societal capacities, welfare resources and sustainability of intergenerational support. Based on the theoretical framework of productive aging (focusing on older adults’ labor participation, caregiving, volunteering and other social activities), Pei-Chun Ko and Wei-Jun Jean Yeung edited special journal issue- Contextualizing Productive Aging in Asia in Social

In this paper, we set out Area Studies’ ‘crisis of legitimacy’, focusing on South East Asia. We distil this crisis down to three broad areas: ‘weak rules’ (the absence of an intellectual core), ‘hard borders’ (in the context of globalization) and ‘ancestral sin’ (Area Studies’ origins in the global North). We then use these as

The papers show that Asian marriage migrants’ experience of integration and assimilation are complex, nuanced, and heterogeneous across migrants’ sociodemographic backgrounds, ethnic profiles, and political contexts. The heterogeneities in Asian marriage migrants’ assimilation trajectories challenge the classic assimilation theory which assumes an unilinear integration trajectory in all relevant aspects. This issue diversifies the academic discourses

The papers in this issue reveal that mobility can reinscribe the normative markers of successful adulthood, or make them harder to reach, creating various frictions and suspensions. Yet mobility can also become a vehicle through which young people actively adjourn life-course expectations or aspire towards alternative routes and possibilities. Both normative and ‘alternative’ aspirations and