This is the third guest-edited issue featuring articles written by faculty who have received support from the Luce Foundation and ASIANetwork for their scholarly work on the Luce Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment (LIASE). Professor Char Miller of Pomona College has generously served as the guest editor for this LIASE series, and once again, his introduction orients readers to the articles published in this issue. All of the articles Professor Miller has overseen across these three issues address the important question of how best to integrate Asian and environmental studies across disciplines and cultures in liberal arts institutions. This is a matter close to the heart of this journal and ASIANetwork.
We are indebted to the previous co-editors of ASIANetwork Exchange, Marsha Smith and Hong Zhang, for arranging the entire three-part series and for all of the excellent work they have done for this journal over the last three years. It is owing to their untiring efforts that we inherited a nearly complete issue only slowed in the publishing process by a few difficulties presented by the time of the pandemic.
As a brief introduction to ourselves as the journal’s new co-editors, we are Susan Bergeron of the Department of Anthropology and Geography and Ron Green of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, both at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina, near Myrtle Beach. We jointly received an ASIANetwork Freeman Student-Faculty Fellowship in 2019 to develop a virtual heritage pilgrimage to Shikoku, Japan, as an educational tool in a gaming environment. We continue to work on this exciting project and look forward to making it available worldwide.
As new co-editors, we hope to uphold the fine standards set by those who came before us, including Erin McCarthy and Lisa Trivedi, who established ASIANetwork Exchange as an online peer-reviewed journal. To this end, we invite you to submit your highest quality works for publication. As we are an online, open-access publication, we are able to include a variety of media in our published articles. We hope you will keep this potential in mind when thinking of the best presentation for your research. We also ask that you submit book reviews, and we are happy to contact publishers to request review copies.
Thank you for your continued support. We are excited to be serving as the editors of ASIANetwork Exchange and look forward to hearing from you and seeing you at the annual ASIANetwork conference. Enjoy the issue!
Competing Interests
The authors have no competing interests to declare.