Welcome to the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, within the Institute of Global Affairs at LSE.
Universities set up research centres to cohere their diverse and disparate group of academics into particular lines of work. Doing this can galvanise research, generate important new insights, open up fundamentally new directions of investigation, and strengthen researcher camaraderie. All these good things can indeed happen, and under a rich variety of ways whereby these research centres might be organized: inter-disciplinarity, funding source, physical organisation, the fine structure of personnel and departmental hierarchy, and thematic divide in and details of the research agenda.
LSE's Southeast Asia Centre is an inter-disciplinary, regionally-focused centre. It certainly hopes to evoke in its affiliated researchers the kind of hyper-driven, impactful research achieved in the best research centres.
But the Southeast Asia Centre is not just a research centre.
For the great majority of university students it is the undergraduate experience that is totally transformative. Those who want to become like their teachers of course stay on in university and become PhD candidates. But it is as university undergraduates that students grow most profoundly, from what they once were as teenagers, to the confident, capable, and empowered individuals that are the graduates from the best universities.
In 2014 LSE enrolled 4300 undergraduates, of whom slightly less than 50% were overseas students, from outside the UK. Undergraduates from Southeast Asia that year numbered over 600. That is, in 2014 Southeast Asia sent LSE one third of the School's overseas undergraduates. In 2014, as indeed for the greater part of the last several decades now, LSE was academic home to more Southeast Asian undergraduates than to undergraduates from China, India, and the US combined.
If the definition of Southeast Asia extended beyond ASEAN and included, say, Hong Kong - in whose population resides many of the same intellectual, social, geographical, and political concerns as those in ASEAN's population - then we're talking half of all LSE overseas undergraduates. The point of this is not to announce that some geographies might be favoured - they are not. It is, instead, to ask how given this landscape we can make the most of LSE for everyone.
So, no, the Southeast Asia Centre is not just a research centre. The centre provides a space at LSE to balance appropriately the interests and concerns of our students. It reaches out to the public, in London and throughout the world, with an active programme of public engagement and research dissemination on the relevant intellectual, political, business, and social developmental concerns for our students specifically and for a shifted, rebalanced world more generally.
The Southeast Asia Centre seeks to improve the student experience.
To find out how we do this, explore the rest of our webpages. Take part in our discussions, forums, and events. Come talk to us.
Danny Quah
Director, LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre
Professor of Economics and International Development, LSE