The Justice in Southeast Asia Lab (JSEALab) is a combination of intensive exchange between faculty and graduate students and public-facing events to amplify the impact of the Henry Luce Foundation-funded five-year initiative on Social Justice in Southeast Asia at the University of Wisconsin. The JSEALab includes a web translation series; an online reading group; an online lecture series; and many other activities. The JSEALab is coordinated by Tyrell Haberkorn and Nalin Sindhuprama. Follow the JSEALab on Facebook. Questions: jsealab@wisc.edu.
Recent News from the Justice in Southeast Asia Lab
Established in 2021 as part of the SJSEA grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Justice in Southeast Asia Lab (JSEALab) is now in its fourth year. A combination of intensive exchange between faculty and graduate students and public-facing events that aim to foster significant collaboration between academics and practitioners, the JSEALab reflects both the recognition that a growing number of MAs and PhDs in Southeast Asian Studies are choosing to pursue professional careers outside the university and that there is a need for academic work to be directly responsive to ongoing social justice crises in the region. We do so through an online, open-access translation series, Justice in Translation, of both central and marginal texts from the region; online lecturers and readings; support for undergraduate and graduate students; and additional exchange activities between scholars and practitioners in Southeast Asia and North America.
We began the year in September 2024 with a visit from Anon Chawalawan, the founder and director of the Museum of Popular History, which documents and collects material of the common people in Thailand, who was a Scholar-in-Residence. While in Madison, he met with archivists, librarians and graduate students, and gave a public lecture on his work. Throughout Fall 2024, we hosted a series of online and in-person reading and lecture series on the situation in Myanmar; these were not recorded for the safety of the participants.
In Spring 2025, the JSEALab continued to support undergraduate and graduate students with funding and mentorship. Two undergraduates, Isa Whitten and Anna Nguyen, received undergraduate mentorship awards from independent work and writing. Four graduate students received small grants to support internships with nongovernmental organizations in Southeast Asia during the summer.
We also organized a series of in-person public events and workshops in Spring 2025. Paul Chambers, a scholar of the military and monarchy in Thailand, joined us in March 2025 for a closed-door public lecture and meetings with graduate students and faculty. Together, we reflected on how to navigate conducting research on sensitive topics and institutions. In April 2025, Peera Songkünnatham, a writer and translator, joined us for a week as a practitioner-in-residence. While at UW, Peera held a workshop on translation and public work for graduate students as well as individual review meetings for student translators who wanted feedback on their work in progress.
The centerpiece of the JSEALab’s spring programming, the anti/AUTHORITARIAN graduate workshop, was held in late April. The workshop brought together nearly 30 graduate students, including 11 from UW-Madison and 18 from universities across the U.S. and Asia. Framed with keynote lectures by Erik Kuhonta, Tuong Vu, and Katherine Bowie, the workshop was organized as a series of dialogies around questions at once scholarly and practical: As authoritarianism rises throughout Southeast Asia and the world, how can scholarship intervene? What questions about how power works and how people resist are urgently needed? What forms of research, analysis, documentation, and creative work can interrupt the violence wrought, past and present, by injustice throughout the region?
Throughout the year, the JSEALab continued Justice in Translation, our open-access, free translation series, publishing on a range of topics, including Thai constitutionalism, left politics past and present, and dissent in Indonesia. Complementing our Henry Luce Foundation funding, the JSEALab was supported by a Project Assistant, Nalin Sindhuprama, with funding for 2024-2025 from the UW Graduate School and the College of Letters and Sciences. The JSEALab also joined a Mellon-Borghesi Workshop on Public Asian Studies, funded by the Center for the Humanities and with participants spanning South and Southeast Asian Studies; the group collectively considered the various publics salient for Asian Studies and how to transform our work and field.
The Article 112 Project, an initiative of the JSEALab, is focused on its namesake, Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code: “Whoever defames, insults or threatens the king, queen, heir-apparent, or regent shall be subject to imprisonment of 3-15 years.” Despite the urgency of the rise in cases, and the analytic questions it necessarily raises, scholarship has remained relatively spare and restriction of freedom of expression in Thailand remains unknown outside the country. The Article 112 Project responds to this lacuna by expanding scholarship and public engagement through translation, research-led undergraduate and graduate teaching and collaboration with relevant U.S., Thai, and international scholars and nongovernmental organizations. With support from UW’s Anonymous Fund, in 2024-2025, the Article 112 Project engaged in a series of research projects, translation publications, online roundtables and workshops, and a Scholars at Risk Student Advocacy Seminar. The Article 112 Project supported four research projects and three creative projects focused on freedom of expression in Thailand; participants shared their progress during a closed-door webinar in May. We held three webinars on academic freedom, human rights, and urgent cases. This included “In Pursuit of Justice: Arnon Nampa, Article 112 and Human Rights in Thailand,” focused on the case of Arnon Nampa, a Thai lawyer and human rights defender currently serving nearly 30 years in prison for peaceful expression; “STARVING FOR JUSTICE: Academic Freedom and Human Rights in Thailand,” on the hunger strike of Siraphob Phumphuengphut, a Thai MA student in political science; and, in collaboration with the Southeast Asian Coalition for Academic Freedom, “RESISTING THREATS: Defending Academic Freedom in Southeast Asia.” The Article 112 Project also published an open-access, free PDF collection of over 400 pages of Arnon Nampa’s letters from his first year in prison (26 September 2023-26 September 2024); this project continues and we look forward to publishing letters from his second year in prison in late 2025 or early 2026. The Scholars at Risk Student Advocacy Seminar, a 1-credit semester-long course in Spring 2025, was joined by 8 undergrad and grad students to learn about academic freedom in Asia and collaborate to raise awareness and engage in advocacy.
For more information about the Justice in Southeast Asia Lab or to get involved, please see our website, follow us on Facebook or Bluesky, or contact Tyrell Haberkorn [tyrell.haberkorn@wisc.edu].
