PurposeThis paper explores the underexamined human dimension of artificial intelligence in education (AIED) within open universities (OUs) in developing Asia, focusing on students’ critical AI literacy and how their insights may help shape more humanistic approaches that integrate ethical and sociopolitical concerns.Design/methodology/approachUsing the method of empathy-based stories (MEBS), responses were gathered from 44 postgraduate students at an OU in developing Asia, then thematically analysed and interpreted through critical discourses on technology and education.FindingsWhile most respondents demonstrate some degree of critical AI literacy, this is largely limited to a foundational level marked by curious scepticism. The study underscores the value of student input not merely as feedback but as epistemic contribution to humanistic AIED. It highlights students’ shared concern about preserving what they see as essential human qualities amid accelerating AI integration.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the limited research on the human dimension of AIED in OUs in developing Asia by centring the student body as key stakeholders and advocating a more humanistic approach. It also offers a novel methodological lens through MEBS to provide fresh insight into student engagement with critical AI literacy.

This article examines Joshua Kam's award-winning novel, How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World, against a conceptual reimagining of Southeast Asia. Drawing inspiration from Kuan-Hsing Chen's model of "Asia as method", it argues that, in the novel, Southeast Asia functions both as the setting and as a "method" of storytelling and epistemic intervention. "Southeast Asia as method", it proposes, points to a Southeast Asia-centric methodological framework that, firstly, narrates a non-Eurocentric story about the region for a readership from the region and, secondly, contests, via fiction, the knowledge produced within the framework of western modernity that casts Southeast Asia and its people in deficit terms. The novel's use of "Southeast Asia as method" is framed as a decolonial one, with a west-decentring grounding and strategy, and the article unpacks this method by drawing on three movements - delinking-linking, reconstitution, and re-existence - as conceptualized by Walter Mignolo.

PurposeThis purpose of this paper is to explore the future of open universities (OUs), particularly in developing Asia, focusing on the potential risks associated with technological solutionism, or the popular belief that educational problems can be readily solved through technological means. This exploration is pertinent as the initial advantages that OUs once held have significantly diminished and competing higher education institutions worldwide are converging on a digital future.Design/methodology/approachThe qualitative method of empathy-based stories (MEBS) was employed as the primary research method for drawing data from sampled OU teachers. The obtained data were parsed via textual analysis and the lens of critical discourses on technology and higher education.FindingsThe study shows that, in the future envisioned by the sampled OU teachers, students’ lack of privileged access to frontier technologies is no barrier to learning success. It also emphasises that learning outcomes have causality beyond technological determinism, and that educational problems, which OUs may deem as requiring technological solutions, are often non-technological in nature and require no technological fixes.Originality/valueCritiques of techno-solutionism, such as the present study, are virtually absent in the context of OUs in developing Asia. For this very reason, this study is vital and serves as a guardrail while these OUs seek to reformulate their respective value propositions in the time of global digital convergence.

Purpose This paper engages Olaf Zawacki-Richter and Insung Jung in a frank and penetrating conversation that seeks to ground, frame, and problematise research in the field conceptualised as “open, distance and digital education” (ODDE). Taking as starting point the recent publication of the landmark Handbook of Open, Distance, and Digital Education (2022), it segues into a broad critique of the shortcomings of ODDE research, the importance of knowledge production on the meso- and macro-levels, the autonomy of ODDE as a field coming into its own, the place of postfoundationalism in ODDE discourse, and related topics that are pivotal in ODDE today. Design/methodology/approach The semi-structured interview was employed as the primary qualitative research method. Findings The research imperative of the relatively young but complex field of ODDE today is not the incessant reiteration of the same but rather a strategic reorientation that, first, circumvents the well-documented yet too-often-overlooked shortcomings of ODDE research and, second, promotes transboundary collaborations with the potential for system-wide impact. Originality/value This novel interview-based critique of ODDE research demonstrates that extending the scholarly discourse beyond the conventional report format is a productive method for enriching conversations on ODDE and vitalising the field itself.

Your debut novel, How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World (HTMIG), was first published in 2020 when you were 23 years of age.That it won the Epigram Books Fiction Prize in the same year must have been a welcomed validation of your effort.What inspired you to write fiction in general, and, in particular, the specific narrative that is HTMIG?

This essay is aboutthe production of scholarship on Malaysian literature in English. On the premise that existing readings of Malaysian texts arelargely based on the methodology of critique, it proposes that the emerging model of reading known as postcritique has the potential to contribute to the further diversification of scholarship on said literature. To illustrateits potential,postcritiqueis put to work on Lee Kok Liang’s classic novel, Flowers in the Sky, leading to the argumentthat negative aesthetics is the hitherto unacknowledged strength of the text and that coming into knowledge of this value requires the reader tonot only think but also feel his way through the act of readingand meaning-making.

This essay examines the obscured history of Zen as an ideology of Japanese imperialism in Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists. It contends that the novel silently draws on this history as a narrative device to subvert readings that overlook both its mobilization of Zen and the fact that Zen, as it is popularly understood today by a majority of scholars and theologians, has been distorted by Western orientalists and Japanese apologists since the turn of the twentieth century. The essay makes a case for the need for readers to account for this obscured history precisely because it exerts overdetermining force on the protagonist's understanding of her experiences of the historical events that shaped her.

This article examines an "invisible" group of Malaysian men who—although straight identified and gender socialized to eroticize and have sexual relations with natural-born females—also secretly have sex with transsexuals and/or feminized gay men, incidentally or occasionally. Specifically, the article looks at how these otherwise heteronormative men are socially constructed in 2 forms of social texts, namely, Malaysian films and interview-derived narratives of transsexuals and feminized gay men. These social texts are parsed through Simon and Gagnon's (1986) theory of sexual scripting to yield 4 constructions of the men under focus: the accidental, the repentant, the volitional, and the cloacal. The contention of this article is that the invisibility of these men is causally linked to the prevailing cultural scenarios in Malaysia that are heavily shaped by political Islamism and weighted in favor of the heteronormative male gender/sex. The article argues also that the invisibility of these men does not render them static and that their sexual practices and the meanings they attach to them have been evolving radically since the mid-1990s, even as the cultural scenarios in Malaysia are becoming increasingly intolerant of nonheteronormative genders and sexualities.

What is the location of agency? And to what extent do historical contingencies and other causalities set the limits of self-autonomy, particularly during the time of Japanese colonialism? This article critically examines how these questions are explored in Tan Twan Eng's novel, The Gift of Rain, essentially the protagonist's autonarrative. Reading the text beyond its popular and authorial representation, and teasing out its homoerotic kernel, I make a case against the protagonist's romantic displacement of agency to the transcendental heart, arguing that Philip Hutton, the protagonist, is in the final account not only far more unfree than he believes, he is also much freer than he knows.

This essay reads Lloyd Fernando's Green is the Colour (1993) against the "lost" (forgotten, erased) but recently recuperated histories of ethnic unity in Malaysia to challenge the state's account which paints the past as a time of disunity and animosity between the ethnicities essentialized as "races". Specifically, I reframe the racial violence of "May 13, 1969" at the heart of Green is the Colour to argue that the novel gives the event a much more radical treatment than has been critically acknowledged. Instead of presupposing racial difference as the natural and spontaneous cause of the violence, the novel, I show, unmasks as myth the account by the state which renders its own complicity invisible.

This essay examines the role of the dominant Malay intelligentsia in imagining Malaysia, using as platform for discussion two contemporary teen novels by Gunawan Mahmood: This Land (originally published in Malay as Tanah Ini in 1996; out in English translation in 2002) and Namaku Ayoko (My Name is Ayoko; 1994). The chosen author and texts are little known outside of the Malay literary world, which alters not the fact that Gunawan is a multiple award-winning, state-affiliated writer who, like many of his Malay-Muslim contemporaries and predecessors, believes that “those with knowledge ought to write” and “literature should educate, awaken and inspire society” (in Mahmood, 1993:x). Gunawan is an ‘intellectual’ insofar as he participates in the production and distribution of knowledge, as someone who professes a vocation for the art of “representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public” (Said, 1996:11). (Text by author)

This chapter attempts to think through these questions using Maniam?s novel, Between Lives (BL), as the main point of reference. It clarifies the term ?culture? and examines its relation to memory and subjectivity. As we know, it is commonplace to observe in contemporary academic discourse including postcolonial studies that the culture of an ethnic community is neither internally homogeneous nor bound by clear-cut boundaries that separate it from other cultures, but is rather a contested object discursively constructed and continually reconstructed within a given configuration of power relations. In Malaysia, race is neither overtly registered nor responded to as a pseudo-scientific index of natural sameness that disavows its constitutive plurality. Keywords: Between Lives ; culture; K.S. Maniam; Malaysia