Jobs, Scholarships, and Conferences in Southeast Asian Studies

Virtual Exhibits and Reports

Muslims of the Midwest

The goal of Muslims of the Midwest is to provide a digital archive that documents some of the varied experiences of Muslims in the American Midwest through testimonies across generational, gender, geographical, socio-economic, and ethnic differences.

Muslims of the Midwest is housed at Michigan State University and was largely funded by a University of Illinois Humanities Without Walls grant. It was also financially supported by the Michigan State University Muslim Studies Program.

Myanmar: Dismantling Dissent – Crackdowns on Internet Freedoms
Asia Centre

Click link in title to read the report; for further information or interview requests, please send requests to Asia Centre at contact@asiacentre.org.

NIU Women in Southeast Asia Virtual Exhibit

In recognition of Women’s History Month, and drawing from the Hart Southeast Asia Collection’s vast troves of materials, Southeast Asia Library Assistant (NIU) Joanna Kulma has put together a digital exhibit about women in Southeast Asia.

Cia Siab (Hope) in Wisconsin Virtual Exhibit

Click the link in title for more information!

Of Harems and Eunuchs: Theravada Buddhist Courts of Mainland Southeast Asia in Comparative Perspective – with Professor Katherine Bowie
TS4 Webinar

Click here for a recording of this talk.

Historic Cham Manuscripts of Vietnam: Creating Access to Endangered Materials
NIU Southeast Asia Digital Library & GETSEA

October 25, 2021
3:00pm CT

The Southeast Asia Digital Library is pleased to announce the launch of a new collection, Historic Cham Manuscripts of Vietnam. The collection contains 977 digitized manuscripts, totaling more than 57,800 pages of content from this important Vietnamese minority group. In celebration of this collection, Hao Phan, Southeast Asia Curator at Northern Illinois University, and Jody Butterworth, Curator for the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, will come together to discuss the origins of this collection, its research potential, and the challenges of digitizing cultural heritage materials in remote field locations. This launch is supported by the consortium for Graduate Education and Training in Southeast Asian Studies (GETSEA). Registration available here.

The Making of ‘Padauk: Myanmar Spring’ – A Panel Discussion
UC Berkeley Human Rights Center & UCLA CSEAS

October 25, 2021
3:30pm CT | 5:30pm PT

Learn more about the making of the new documentary, Padauk: Myanmar Spring (2021, USA, 56 min.), with this discussion about how it came to be. The documentary, which will be available for online viewing before and after this discussion, focuses on the protests that erupted in Myanmar following the February 2021 military coup. Directors Jeanne Hallacy and Rares Michael Ghilezan take the viewer to the streets of Myanmar through the eyes of Nant, a young, first-time protester.

Speakers: Rares Michael Ghilezan, Nant Ingyin Kyaw Soe, Jeanne Hallacy
Moderator: Kenneth Wong (UC Berkeley)

The film can be viewed online from October 22 through October 26 on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/627813024/fa5a3464d6

Registration here.

The Past, Present, and Future of LGBT Activism in Singapore: A Roundtable on Pink Dot
CSEAS, University of Michigan

October 25, 2021
8:30am – 10am CT

This roundtable panel discusses the success and limits of an annual LGBT event called Pink Dot that began in Singapore, a city-state that imposes significant barriers to political organizing. The first decade of Pink Dot has now come to an end, but it is clear that the annual event has had a significant impact in terms of increased visibility for a marginalized community. Yet, despite the successes of Pink Dot, very little has concretely changed in Singapore for LGBT individuals.

In July 2021, the Journal of Language and Sexuality (J. Lang. Sex.) published the first special issue dedicated to Pink Dot. In exploring the use of language in the Pink Dot movement, the articles in this special issue simultaneously grapple with the past decade of Pink Dot and explore whether LGBT activism in Singapore might be evolving beyond the relatively ‘acceptable’ approach of Pink Dot’s strategic assimilationism.

The panel will be joined by the acclaimed Singaporean poet Alfian Sa’at, Professor Michelle Lazar of the National University of Singapore, and the three editors of the J. Lang. Sex. Professor Adi Saleem Bharat of the University of Michigan, Professor Robert Phillips of Ball State University, and Ph.D. student candidate Pavan Mano of King’s College London. Register here.

Paper Chains from Fields to Archives: A View of the Information Economy in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Indonesia
Yale University, Council on Southeast Asian Studies

October 27, 2021
11:00am CT | 12:00pm ET

(Re)contextualising the Dong Duong Buddhist art gallery at the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang
SOAS, University of London & Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore

October 28, 2021
6:00am CT | 12:00pm London time

Constructed in 875 CE under the reign of Indravarman II, the Đồng Dương Monastery was once the largest Buddhist sites of the Champa kingdoms. Excavations conducted by the École française d’Extrême-Orient in the early 20th century unearthed numerous Buddhist artefacts dating to around the 9th and 10th centuries, which are today exhibited at many museums in Vietnam and abroad. This lecture critically examines the Đồng Dương Buddhist gallery at the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang. It argues that the current display is an attempt to re-contextualize the original landscape of the Đồng Dương monastery and the significance of the Đồng Dương Buddhist art tradition. However, due to the employment of modern “museological devices”, insufficient interpretation and the gaps caused by absent objects it is argued that what results is a de-contextualized display which is largely inaccessible to museum viewers. My analysis of the display also aims to provide a context within which we can see problems in the curation of this gallery from the colonial to the post-colonial period. Find more information and registration here.

Transnational Marriage: Hmong American Men and Hmong Thai Women
CSEAS UW-Madison & Hmong Studies Consortium

October 28, 2021
7:00pm CT

Transnational marriage between Hmong American and Hmong Thai/Lao is a controversial topic in the Hmong community because of the many conflicts associated with it: polygyny, abusive international marriage, domestic violence, etc. Anecdotally, Hmong Thai/Lao women who married Hmong American men are given two dominant negative narratives by the larger Hmong American community. These women are portrayed as either victims being exploited by the old Hmong American men or as calculating women taking advantage of old unintelligent Hmong American men. The goals of the women are portrayed as being to gain wealth and the opportunity to migrate to America. With the intention of better understanding Hmong Thai/Lao women and their reasons for marrying Hmong American men, I conduted in-depth interviews with two Hmong Thai women: Ka, who lives in Minnesota, and Pang, who lives in Wisconsin. Ka and Pang (pseudonyms) are both originally from Northern Thailand and both married Hmong American men. My interviews reveal that both women express different reasons for choosing to marry their husbands: career advancement opportunities, influences from their families, and love. They do not fit well with the negative narratives and stereotypes about Hmong Thai/Lao women who marry Hmong American men. This suggests that a more nuanced perspective is appropriate. More information and registration here.

Pluralist visions and transnational research in Myanmar from 1911 to 2021
KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies

October 28, 2021
8:30am CT

The protests in response to the devastating military coup in Myanmar in February of this year demonstrated an inspiring aspect of racial, ethnic and religious pluralism and solidarity. In contrast to the events of the previous five years, in which Myanmar seemed increasingly polarized by anti-Muslim sentiment and violence against the Rohingya and other ethnic minorities, the images in protest signs, internet campaigns and marches demonstrated Buddhist-Muslim-Christian-Hindu collaboration and young people denounced their previous nationalist stances asking Muslims and ethnic minority people for forgiveness. Watching it unfold was seeing a new visions of Myanmar society be enacted in the streets. But to an historian, this had some very old resonances as well. In 1911, Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus shut down the city of Rangoon together, marching from Chinatown, through the Indian bazaars to the courthouse to show their solidarity with an Irish Buddhist monk accused of sedition against the British colonial government. Both movements revealed a series of networks and alliances that defied the divisions that the contemporary public commentary believed defined their society. More information available here.

Social media, politics, and schismatic algorithms in Indonesia
Sydney Southeast Asia Centre

October 28, 2021
9:00am CT

All over the world, including Indonesia, social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, and devices such as smartphones have increasingly played an instrumental role in facilitating and mobilizing collective actions and activism. The same technologies have also simultaneously been utilized by states and public authorities for their own benefits, including to control public opinions and repress dissents. Moving away from assessing the presumed (un)democratic potentials of social media, Merlyna Lim explores complex and contradictory relationships between social media and politics and offers an in-depth understanding of how state and society relations, power, and politics are contested and exercised on, with, and through social media. Drawing on empirical snapshots from the country, Merlyna specifically analyzes how social media platforms, and their algorithms, were utilized and appropriated by activists and ordinary people on the grassroots level, both in the pursuit of a counter-hegemonic project as well as in support of the status quo.

The Sydney Southeast Asia Centre invites you to join Associate Professor Merlyna Lim, in conversation with Ms. Irene Poetranto to explore the complex and contradictory relationships between social media and politics. The conversation will be moderated by Dr. David Kloos. More information here.

Reframing the Borders of Belonging: Crypto-Nationalism in the Akha World of the Upper Mekong Region
NIU CSEAS

October 29, 2021
12:00pm CT

In this talk, Professor Micah Morton discusses the work of certain ethnic Akha elite to promote a pan-Akha identity among their roughly 730,000 ethnic kin residing throughout the Upper Mekong Region. The region’s ongoing transformation from battlefields to markets is being accompanied by the growth of more formal transborder ties among a number of non-dominant ethnic groups, such as the Akha, Dai-Lue, Lahu, and Hmong. Since the late 2000s, a network of self-declared “Neo-Traditionalist” Akha elite based in the Thai-Myanmar borderlands has been recrafting the religio-political borders of belonging in a larger “Akha World” in the making that encompasses multiple local, national, and regional borders.

Micah Morton’s analysis of this particular Akha case moves beyond long-standing views of borders as peripheral sites of rupture, enclosure, and limitation towards an equal consideration of borders as central sites of continuity, permeability, and possibility. He further describes Akha elites’ larger world in the making as a “crypto-nationalist” formation or non-state space nevertheless shaped in the likeness and image of the nation state on multiple fronts. Most Akha elite are adamant that their larger world building project is anything other than a state project, all the while exhibiting an acute awareness of their lacking any state of their own yet adopting many state-making technologies. The latter positions are the preeminent traits of the concept of “crypto-nationalism” as introduced in the talk. More information available here.

Poetry Against Tyranny: A Reading and Conversation with Three Burmese Poets
Harvard University Asia Center

October 29, 2021
3:00pm CT

Born and raised in Yangon, Myanmar, Chu May Paing is a first-gen immigrant currently pursuing her PhD in cultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is also the founder and director of Aruna Global South, a non-profit that serves to highlight and amplify experimental scholarship from scholars of marginalized backgrounds with interests in Asia and its diasporas. Her academic writings have appeared in The New Ethnographer, American Ethnologist, Society for Linguistic Anthropology among others. When Chu is not doing research on signs, symbols, and images in Burmese political communication, she writes under the pen name of Ma Chinthe (Miss Lion). Her creative writing in Burmese has appeared in Aruna Global South blog and is forthcoming in Jakarta Biennial.

Edna Du (Ei Htet) is a reader, writer, and community supporter. She was born and raised in Yangon, Myanmar before moving to the United States. They are currently located on the traditional and unceded territory of the Tongva people (Los Angeles). She holds a B.A. in Politics from Willamette University, with a focus on international human rights and children in armed conflict. They also write under the pen name Away and has appeared on the Aruna Global South blog. Their commitments include transnational justice, mutual aid, and community building.

Me Me Khant (Penname: PamarNi) is a Burmese poet from Yangon, Myanmar. She began her poetry journey by writing political poems in local media outlets, criticizing the military-controlled education system (particularly the National Education Law) and crackdown of the journalists. She has then transitioned to composing a wide array of topics from love to banishment, and she especially enjoys writing about her home city. She is currently a Knight Hennessy Scholar at Stanford University, pursuing a Master’s in International Policy.

Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a writer and a poet from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work has appeared in Longleaf Review, Tint Journal, perhappened mag, and elsewhere. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of the South and is an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is also a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. At 21, she co-founded the Yangon Literary Magazine, providing a platform for young and emerging Burmese writers to showcase their work. During her undergraduate years at Sewanee, she was involved in a number of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, serving as the president of the Organization for Cross-Cultural Understanding (OCCU) for two years and as the Order of the Gown president in her senior year.

More information here.

Queer Dis/inheritance: Vietnamese Radical Activism on Intergenerational Trauma, Refugee Lineage, and Chosen Future
UCLA CSEAS

November 1, 2021
11:30am CT | 9:30am PT

In January 2021, the defunct South Vietnamese flag was featured prominently on American national platforms because of its appearance alongside the white supremacist mob stomping Capitol Hill. A puzzling image for the American public, it revokes the haunting memory of the Vietnam War, and to many Vietnamese Americans activists, an underexamined difficult history of South Vietnamese refugee activism in the last thirty years––particularly, the public’s increasing conflation between Vietnam War era anticommunism with America’s deepening of right-wing conservatism.

Addressing these concerns, this talk will delineate a different genealogy of Vietnamese/American activism: the political and cultural work amongst Vietnamese refugee descendants. It examines how they navigate the intersection of American structural forgetting, war memory, and intergenerational trauma. In doing so, on the one hand, this talk will explors the vast range of refugee political subjectivities––something willfully obscured by Vietnam War historiography. Relatedly, it centers Vietnamese/American radical activism to disrupt the overarching damage-oriented discourse about war refugees. Finally, focusing on refugee descendants, the talk will present a long-overdue examination of the activists and artists of the “generation after” who actively engage with the past to imagine a chosen future without harm.

Ly Thuy Nguyen (she/they) is a bilingual queer scholar, translator, and artist. Ly studies transnational histories of war, race, and empire. Her research incorporates discussions about culture, language, queer dis/inheritance, refugee epistemologies, transnational activism, and intergenerational trauma. Ly’s scholarship is based on their work fostering social and language justice within the Vietnamese/ American community and beyond. Ly is currently an Assistant Professor in Asian American Studies and a founding faculty of the Department of Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies at Augsburg University. For more information on Ly, visit ly-nguyen.com. More information and webinar registration here.

Cartoons, Curses, and Coups: Interpellation from Below in a Rights-less Myanmar
CSEAS UC Berkeley

November 2, 2021
6:00pm CT | 4:00pm PT

How are political cartoons similar to occult cursing ceremonies, and what can both tell us about acts of resistance/refusal in a context where subjects lack rights to secure their interventions? This talk develops Judith Butler’s conceptualization of catachresis and applies it to Burmese political cartoons, exploring how they stage elite Burmese subjects mishearing everyday speech. These cartoons present the mishearing as resulting in interpellations that are framed as emerging from elites’ own anxieties: they not only interpret the misheard words as an accusation levelled at them, but by so doing, they betray their shame about having committed the accused transgression.

The talk then shows how catachresis applies to activist-led occult cursing rituals, which hail spirits to come judge the rightful owners of stolen land. While appearing aggressive and confrontational, these rituals actually rely on similar logics to the cartoons: by mediatizing and circulating the events, protesters seek to create a field of joint attention in which state elites are not only interpellated, but come to realize they are being interpellated. Catachresis occurs when the elite entertains this alternative domain of power as implicating him (rather than dismissing the curse as a desperate tactic).

The talk concludes by reflecting on the necessity of such maneuvers in the context of the February 2021 military coup, examining the profusion of cursing ceremonies in the ongoing uprising in Myanmar today, which act as part of a general refusal of the military-state’s attempt to monopolize the symbolic realm. Registration here.

Political Violence in Southeast Asia Since 1945: Case Studies from Six Countries
Yale University, Council on Southeast Asian Studies

November 3, 2021
11:00am CT | 12:00pm ET

This book examines postwar waves of political violence that affected six Southeast Asian countries – Indonesia, Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam – from the wars of independence in the mid-twentieth century to the recent Rohingya genocide.

Featuring cases not previously explored, and offering fresh insights into more familiar cases, the chapters cover a range of topics including the technologies of violence, the politics of fear, inclusion and exclusion, justice and ethics, repetitions of mass violence events, impunity, law, ethnic and racial killings, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The book delves into the violence that has reverberated across the region spurred by local and global politics and ideologies, through the examination of such themes as identity ascription and formation, existential and ontological questions, collective memories of violence, and social and political transformation. In our current era of global social and political transition, the volume’s case studies provide an opportunity to consider potential repercussions and outcomes of various political and ideological positionings and policies.

Enhancing our understanding of the technologies, techniques, motives, causes, consequences, and connections between violent episodes in the Southeast Asian cases, the book raises key questions for the study of mass violence worldwide. More information and registration available here.

Repossessing Shanland: Myanmar, Thailand, and a Nation-State Deferred
UCLA CSEAS

November 3, 2021
2:00pm CT | 4:00pm PT

Around five million people across Southeast Asia identify as Shan. Though the Shan people were promised an independent state in the 1947 Union of Burma Constitution, successive military governments blocked their liberation. From 1958 onward, insurgency movements, including the Shan United Revolutionary Army, have fought for independence from Myanmar. Refugees numbering in the hundreds of thousands fled to Thailand to escape the conflict, despite struggling against oppressive citizenship laws there. Several decades of continuous rebellion have created a vacuum in which literati and politicians have constructed a virtual Shanland that lives on in popular media, rock music, and Buddhist ritual.

Based on long-term ethnography across three horizons and three vernaculars, Jane M. Ferguson details the origins of these movements and tells the story of the Shan in their own voices. She shows how they have forged a homeland and identity during great upheaval by using state building as an ongoing project of resistance, resilience, and accommodation within both countries. In avoiding a good/bad moral binary and illuminating cultural complexities, Repossessing Shanland offers a fresh perspective on identity creation, transformation, and how people understand and experience borderlands today.

Jane M. Ferguson teaches Anthropology and Southeast Asian history at the Australian National University. She has carried out ethnographic research in both urban and uplands Southeast Asia, as well as transnational aviation spaces. Her eclectic publications record includes work on issues of ethnic insurgency, bicycle messengers, historical understandings of race and sovereignty, musical genres, airline cultures, and the social history of Burmese cinema. She is the Editor of The Journal of Burma Studies. More information available here.

Decolonisation in Colonial Institutions: Reparative Approaches to Philippine Collections in a U.S. University
SOAS, University of London & Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore

November 4, 2021
5:00am CT | 11:00am London time

The sizable Philippine collections at the University of Michigan underscore this institution’s role in U.S. colonial expansion. Michigan faculty, students, and alumni came to the Philippines to teach, conduct field research, establish business ventures, and participate in colonial administration. This involvement resulted in the accumulation of one of the largest Philippine collections in North America. It is time for the University to address its colonial complicity in the formation of these collections by developing decolonial and anti-racist policies and practices. This presentation will discuss the current efforts to develop alternative ways to represent and provide access to Philippine materials held by the University’s Bentley Historical Library, the Special Collections Research Center, and the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. This project asks: What constitutes reparative work in the decolonization of the University’s Philippine collections? This effort will: 1. define what it means to pursue decolonial praxis for Philippine collections; 2. identify institutional obligations and articulating reparative work; 3. reimagine community engagement; and finally, 4. decenter colonial provenance to better represent Indigenous communities and knowledge to understand the full extent of the collection. Find more information and registration here.

Sarong Revolution: The Myanmar Coup, Militarization, and Gendered Resistance in the Borderlands of Asia
Harvard University Asia Center

November 4, 2021
9:30am CT | 10:30am ET

More information and registration available here.

Placing Blame: Climate, Culpability and Indigenous Lives in the Philippines
SEAP Cornell University (Gatty Lecture Series)

November 4, 2021
11:15am CT | 12:15pm ET

Will Smith is an anthropologist and human geographer whose research is focused on human-forest interfaces, the social dimensions of agricultural production, and the politics of indigenous knowledge in both Australia and upland Southeast Asia. His current research is focused on the illegal wildlife trade in the Philippines and conservation-based solutions to zoonotic disease emergence. Registration here.

Woman behind the Shadows: My Journey with Puppets and Tradition in Bali
NIU CSEAS

November 4, 2021
12:30pm CT

In 2008, while in Bali to study women and traditional performance, Professor Jennifer Goodlander met puppeteer I Wayan Tunjung.  He agreed to teach her how to perform one of the most important genres of performance on the island — wayang kulit, or shadow puppetry. Little did she realize that this opportunity to better understand Balinese cultures and arts would turn into an amazing journey of ritual and shadows. In this talk, Jennifer will describe the training and rituals she experienced while becoming a dalang, or puppeteer, in order to provide insight into the function of tradition in Balinese religion and culture.

Jennifer Goodlander is an Associate Professor at Indiana University in the Department of Comparative Literature where she teaches classes on Indonesian and global theatre, literature, and other arts. She is also an active affiliate faculty member in Theatre and Drama, Folklore, and Museum Studies. Jennifer has published numerous articles and two books: Women in the Shadows: Gender, Puppets, and the Power of Tradition in Bali (Ohio University Press, 2016) and Puppets and Cities: Articulating Identities in Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018). Her current research looks at transnational Southeast Asian identities as expressed in performance, literature, and art. Jennifer is also the current President for the Association of Asian Performance. More information available here.

Is the Philippines Asia’s Banana Republic? Vertical Disintegration After Empire
CSEAS, University of Michigan

November 5, 2021
12:00pm – 1:00pm CT

The term “banana republic,” a racializing pejorative used to describe Central American economies, does not usually conjure images of Asia. Yet it has become a common moniker for the state of the Philippines’ political and economic systems. Both journalistic and academic writing have used the label to characterize every administration from Ferdinand Marcos (1965 – 1986) to Rodrigo Duterte (2016 – current), citing U.S. intervention in politics, a state of bloodshed and rebellion, the persistence of kleptocracy in high office, the lack of government accountability, and the rampancy of inequality. These popular references suggest that notions of a “Philippine banana republic” have little to do with the tropical commodity on which the metaphor is based. This paper, in response, turns to the export banana zones of southeastern Mindanao as both the metaphoric root and a material source of the power asymmetries that envelop the agrarian landscape of the Philippine south. It offers historical comparisons between the Southeast Asian nation and Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Honduras to demonstrate how scholarly understandings of the “banana republics” shift in the Asian context. Focusing on (1) new land control schemes devised by the same American fruit conglomerates; (2) foundational ties to import markets in Japan, rather than to the U.S. and Europe; and (3) a history of peri-colonialism in Mindanao, this paper shows the role that the industry has played both in shaping local political and economic conditions, and in differentiating Philippine banana trade from networks in the same commodity elsewhere in the world. More information here.

Holding Tightly: Culture and Healing in Timore-Leste
NIU CSEAS

November 5, 2021
12:00pm CT

CKS Workshop: How to Write a Strong Research Proposal
Center for Khmer Studies

November 5, 2021
9:00pm CT

The Relevance of Opera in Contemporary Thailand | A Talk by Tarin Prinyaknit and Voraprach Wongsathapornpat
The Siam Society

November 6, 2021
4:00am CT | 4:00pm Bangkok time

In 2020, a young pair of stage director Tarin (Tim) Prinyaknit, and conductor Voraprach (Mickey) Wongsathapornpat, teamed up to stage a critically acclaimed production of Donizetti’s famous comic opera L’elisir d’amore in Bangkok, with a goal to popularise and further the cause of opera as a performing art in Thailand. The production reimagined the social context and transported the opera from its original 18th-century setting to a bustling modern-day shopping mall in the middle of Bangkok: a re-contextualisation that not only brings out the hilariously familiar and universal plot structure for Thailand’s audience, but also serves as a commentary on modern-day Bangkok’s conspicuous consumption, its rising capitalism and social inequality. With the team’s extensive experience in Italian opera, they shed new interpretive lights on the beloved classic bel canto piece. This talk incorporates music and video clips and presents the team’s thesis on the incredible relevance of opera in our present-day Thailand as a poignant, relatable and engaging art form, where social commentary and the human conditions are related to the audience more deeply than any other kind of performing arts. The talk will also include introductions and sneak previews into the team’s upcoming planned production of Puccini’s comedic masterpiece Gianni Schicchi. More information available here.

Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia
Harvard University Asia Center

November 8, 2021
9:00am CT | 10:00am ET

Across Southeast Asia, as in many other regions, politicians win elections by distributing cash, goods, jobs, projects, and other benefits to supporters. But they do so in ways that vary tremendously—both across and within countries. In this talk, and in our forthcoming book, Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (also with Edward Aspinall and Paul Hutchcroft), we present a new framework for analyzing variation in patronage democracies, focusing on distinct forms of patronage and different networks through which it is distributed. We do so by drawing on a massive, multi-country, multi-year research effort involving interactions with hundreds of politicians and vote brokers, as well as surveys of voters and political campaigners across the region. We explore how local machines in the Philippines, ad hoc election teams in Indonesia, and political parties in Malaysia pursue distinctive clusters of strategies of patronage distribution—what we term electoral mobilization regimes. In doing so, we demonstrate how and why patronage politics varies, how it works on the ground, and how the status quo might change. More information and registration available here.

Knowledge Organizations in the Thai Tobacco Control Movement
Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS), NYSEAN, Weatherhead East Asian Institute (WEAI)

November 9, 2021
8:00am CT | 9:00am ET

Scholars have frequently understood development as a process that is either “market-led” or “state-led,” with the industrial development of classic developmental states, like Japan, led by a guiding state agency, like Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry. In Thailand, however, rather than development being state- or market-led, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and autonomous parastatal organizations serve as important “knowledge organizations” that orbit around a pilot agency concerned not with economic development, but social development—the Ministry of Public Health. These knowledge organizations make important technical contributions to national policy successes, while also playing important roles in cementing the country’s reputation abroad. This talk will focus on the role played by knowledge organizations in the field of public health in Thailand, focusing on the case of tobacco control. More information and registration available here.

Testimony as Transformation: Resilience, Regeneration, and Moral Action through Spiritually-Adapted Narrative Therapy in Cambodia
Yale University, Council on Southeast Asian Studies

November 10, 2021
11:00am CT | 12:00pm ET

Oil Palm and Rubber Plantations
Southeast Asia in Transition: Plastic Runs Through it Webinar Series
East-West Center, UH-Manoa CSEAS, and Michigan State University

November 10, 2021
6:00-7:30 pm CT

Zoom link and more information available soon.

The Politics of Greater India and Indonesian Collections in Museums of ‘Asian Art’
SOAS, University of London & Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore

November 11, 2021
5:00am CT | 11:00am London time

Since the nineteenth century, today’s South and Southeast Asia have become part of scholarly and popular thinking that defines the region as a single, superior, Hindu-Buddhist civilisation with its source in India. This double lecture addresses the continuing legacies of this imagined Greater India via academia, museums, and popular culture worldwide. In museums of so-called ‘Asian Art’ in the West, well-choreographed exhibitions strategically use light and space to emphasise the spiritual power and inner beauty of Hindu and Buddhist statues, evoking ideas of Greater India. In this way, they obfuscate the violence underlying how objects were collected, researched and interpreted, and they depict Southeast Asia – and thus, central in this talk, today’s Muslim-majority Indonesia – as the passive recipient of a superior Indian civilisation. In contrast, the National Museum of Indonesia in Jakarta, for instance, tells the history of Indonesia. Bloembergen, a historian, and Mechling, an art historian, will explore from their respective perspectives and research the impact of the Greater India phenomenon on ancient Hindu and Buddhist objects from Indonesia, reflecting on how to decolonise the museum, but also on what it is then that actually needs to be being decolonised. Find more information and registration here.

Undermining Democracy: The Election Commission of Thailand in the 2019 Election
TS4 Webinar

November 11, 2021
8 am CET | 1:00 am Central Time

Join Dr Petra Desatova (University of Copenhagen) and Assistant Professor Saowanee Alexander (Ubon Ratchathani University) to discuss the role of the election commission of Thailand in the 2019 election.

This talk examines the Election Commission of Thailand (ECT), Thailand’s formally independent electoral management body (EMB), and the role it played in the 2019 election. Dr Desatova and Assistant Professor Alexander argue that in non-democratic regimes with high levels of political polarisation and entrenched elites, such as contemporary Thailand, formal EMB independence may become part of the problem why elections fail. It creates opportunities for long-term EMB capture by actors who wield power outside of formal politics and are unaccountable to public interest. In case of the ECT, this has led to the decreasing electoral standards culminating in the highly contentious 2019 election where the ECT’s administrative efficiency and effectiveness of voting came secondary to pleasing the entrenched old Thai elite. Its conduct has reduced Thailand’s prospects for a peaceful transition to democratic rule as those who oppose the country’s old elite have increasingly limited opportunities to challenge it through formal means. You can register for this talk here.

Star Trek Made Me American: Fandom, Piracy, and the Filipino-American Experience
SEAP Cornell University (Gatty Lecture Series)

November 11, 2021
11:15am CT | 12:15pm ET

Abigail De Kosnik is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies. She is also the Director of BCNM, and is the 2020-2025 craigslist Distinguished Chair in New Media. She is the author of Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (MIT Press, 2016) and co-editor, with Keith Feldman, of #identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation (University of Michigan Press, 2019). She has published articles on media fandom, popular digital culture, social media, and performance studies in Third Text, Cinema Journal (now Journal of Cinema and Media Studies), The International Journal of Communication, Modern Drama, Transformative Works and Cultures, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Performance Research, and elsewhere. She co-organizes The Color of New Media, a working group focusing on technology and intersectionality. De Kosnik is Filipina American. Registration here.

How to Highlight International Experiences on a Resume
UW-Madison IRIS

November 17, 2021
4:00pm – 5:15pm CT

In celebration of International Education Week, join us for a Career Workshop to practice articulating skills on your resume.

Register to learn how to clearly explain:

• major and certificate content knowledge

• international experiences outside of the classroom

• short and long-term personal and professional goals

The first 20 UW-Madison students to register and attend will receive a copy of You Majored in What?: Designing Your Path from College to Career by Dr. Katharine Brooks. This event is cohosted with the Language Institute, the Institute for Regional and International Studies, and IRIS NRC. More information available here.

Two-handed Vitarka gesture and the cross-handed gesture: the linkage between Thailand and Sri Lankan Buddhist Art | A Talk by Chedha Tingsanchali
The Siam Society

November 18, 2021
3:00am CT

It is generally known that Thailand has overwhelmingly been influenced by Sinhalese Buddhism from the 13th century onwards. However, there are some traces of Sri Lankan iconography, especially the gesture of Buddha which is interestingly linkable to Sri Lankan art, even before the 13th century. Two-handed Vitarka gesture and the cross-handed gesture are amongst them. This lecture aims to introduce some Buddhist interlinkage through the gestures of Buddha and their iconography. More information available here.

Nhu Quynh’s Stardom: The (Re)making of Gender on Screen and the Contemporary Vietnamese Film Industry
CSEAS, University of Michigan

November 19, 2021
12:00pm – 1:00pm CT

More information to come. Register here.

Sacred States and Subjects: Religion, Law, and State-Building in Colonial Malaya
SEAP Cornell University (Gatty Lecture Series)

December 2, 2021
11:15am CT | 12:15pm ET

Hanisah Abdullah Sani is a comparative-historical sociologist of empire and state-formation, modernization, and development. Her research lies in the intersection of law and society, religion and politics, and social change; and she specializes in the colonial and modern histories of the Malay world and Southeast Asia. Dr. Sani received her PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago in 2019, and was a Visiting Associate at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan from 2019-21. She was a National University of Singapore Overseas Graduate Scholar and Overseas Postdoctoral Fellow, where she is currently faculty member in Malay Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Registration here.

The Role of Strategic Ignorance in Indonesian Agrarian Development
CSEAS, University of Michigan

December 3, 2021
12:00pm – 1:00pm CT

More information to come. Register here.

Politics of Conservation and Heritage
Southeast Asia in Transition: Plastic Runs Through it Webinar Series
East-West Center, UH-Manoa CSEAS, and Michigan State University

December 8, 2021
6:00-7:30pm CT

Zoom link and more information coming soon.