Paper Short Abstract:

Area Studies face challenges as enrolments in non-English languages decline and programs close due to market-driven policies. This limits fieldwork and threatens cross-cultural research. Despite public interest in global cultures via media, academic trends undervalue area specialists, risking the spread of orientalist tropes.

Paper Abstract:

Folklorists, anthropologists, and ethnologists have long crafted descriptions of diversity by immersing themselves in cultures across the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. Today, this tradition faces significant challenges. Enrolments in non-English languages are declining, and programme closures in the UK, Australia, and beyond reflect the failures of university marketization. Reliant on student recruitment revenue and subject to populist policies, universities are increasingly less supportive of cross-cultural and multilingual scholarship.

As a result, fewer scholars engage in fieldwork in culturally distant contexts, shifting research toward topics ‘close to home.’ This trend renders area specialists more precarious—whether early-career researchers constrained by narrow funding or established academics facing institutional uncertainty. Public interest in areas such as East Asia thrives through popular media formats like podcasts and vlogging. At the same time, increasing numbers of disciplines are keen to comment on other cultures as a part of impact and decolonisation without area specialists included. In this context, the viability of area studies in academia continues to decline. The ‘cruel optimism’ of marketization has devalued area studies just as public curiosity about these regions grows. Perhaps ironically, there is increasingly high-quality popular media that generates insights scholars strive for. At the same time, problematic material abounds. Without spaces dedicated to comparative perspectives, linguistic proficiency, and the practice of rendering the ‘strange familiar,’ public discourse risks perpetuating orientalist tropes. Following the above, I explore how we are in the midst of ‘unwriting’ area specialism.