EVENT LIST : 

SEASREP held a Workshop for Young Southeast Asian Scholars

As part of its “Scanning the Landscape of Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia” project, SEASREP held a workshop for twelve emerging (mid-level) Southeast Asian scholars who do research on the region.

The workshop was attended by the following participants:

• Muhammad Najib bin Noorashid, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei
• Sok Udom Deth, Paragon International University, Cambodia
• Muhammad Riza Nurdin, International Centre for Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies, Indonesia
• Muhammad Zamal Nasution, Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia
• Boualaphiane Sisouk, National University of Laos, Laos
• Tan Zi Hao, Multimedia University, Malaysia
• Mark Inigo Tallara, De La Salle University, Philippines
• Theodora Lam, Asia Research Institute, Singapore
• Onanong Thippimol, Thammasat University, Thailand
• Thanyarat Apiwong, Chiang Mai University, Thailand
• Nguyen Ha Phuong, Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Vietnam
• Nguyen Quang Dung, Vietnam National University – Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Resources and more information : https://seasrepfoundation.org/seasrep-held-a-workshop-for-young-southeast-asian-scholars/

Exhibition “Never Give Up: 2 Years into the Myanmar Coup” — Part I

January 24 @ 10:00 am - February 5 @ 8:00 pm

The 1st of February 2023 marks the second anniversary of military dictatorship in Myanmar. Since the coup, people have suffered under the repressive military rule in a collapsed state. They have experienced daily violation of rights, war crimes and crimes against humanity, murder, sexual violence, and torture. By December 2022, the United Nations estimated that there were 1.5 million displaced people; 34,000 destroyed homes; villages burned to the ground; a looming food crisis; and 140,000 Rohingya in de facto internment camps while others suffer deprivation and discrimination rooted in their lack of citizenship. In addition to the trauma inflicted in people, the military coup has “crippled Myanmar’s economy”, as millions have lost their incomes, the national currency has plummeted, and prices have surged.

And despite it all, people have continued to fight for justice. Since the early days of the military coup, people’s response against the military has been unapologetic: pot-banging, ribbon wearing, being silent, joining the civil disobedience movement, clasping hands during peaceful protests, making opposition art works in multiple forms, or raising the three-finger salute. These are just a fraction of the many acts of civil disobedience despite the collective terror suffered. Differently from what has been happening in the past, a nation-wide revolutionary project has started that cuts across diverse age, socio-economic and identity groups, including an assertion of the rights of those who have been left at the margins ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. The message is the same: Never give up!

Honoring this spirit of creativity and resilience, the two-part art exhibitions “Never Give Up: 2 Years into the Myanmar Coup” gather artworks of artists from Myanmar. Through poems, videos, photographs and paintings, they reflect on the ongoing challenges while stressing the centrality of human rights as well as their vision and hopes for a new just future for Myanmar.

Organized by SEA Junction in collaboration with Doh Hlay, the exhibitions showcasing the artworks from a larger online exhibition at www.dohhlay.com are on display from 24 January to 5 February (Part I) on the curved wall, 4th floor and from 21 February to 5 March 2023 (Part II) on the curved wall, 3rd floor of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC). The official opening is on 28 January 2023, 5.30-7.00 pm at SEA Junction venue and the program will soon be announced. 

For more information : http://seajunction.org/event/exhibition-never-give-up-2-years-into-the-myanmar-coup-part-i/ 

Scholarship Offer : 

Cooling Asia: Technology, Environment and Society in Hot Climates

More Information : https://ari.nus.edu.sg/events/cooling-asia/

This workshop examines the relationship between cooling technologies, the environment, and societies in Asia through interdisciplinary perspectives. Cooling technologies include, but are not limited to, those that create airflow, evaporation, endothermic reactions, and refrigeration cycles. They also include broader technological infrastructures, such as airconditioned built environments, produce cold chains, and the electricity and water networks that support them. Residents of Asia have long relied upon such technologies to regulate thermal sensations and to preserve and distribute produce. At the same time these cooling technologies have modified Asian environments across different scales, in both direct and indirect ways. In contemporary Asia, cooling technologies have become a major source of energy consumption and, so, are contributing to both local and global patterns of climate change.
This workshop explores cooling technologies from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Rather than focusing solely upon technological innovation, we intend to also examine these technologies in use, and explore them throughout their life cycles, considering multiple dimensions including the socio-cultural adaptation of technologies, maintenance and repair, energy consumption, and pollution and waste. We recognize that our technological infrastructures are shaped by social, political, and cultural choices, and shape these choices in turn. The cooling technologies we choose are influenced by social norms of comfort, health and convenience, but many other factors besides. Cooling technologies are co-constituted with cooling practices and thermal material cultures, as Elizabeth Shove and others point out.
We are indeed interested in an array of cooling technologies for both dry and humid climates. Many of the discussions of cooling technologies tend to be divided into passive and active modes, structural solutions and power-operated solutions, or pre- and post-air-conditioning. We would like to think beyond such binaries to engage with a mix or combination of modes and solutions through not just designed mixed-mode buildings, but also heterogeneous assemblies of technologies and spaces produced through everyday uses; what David Edgerton calls “creole technologies”. In addition, none of the categories is monolithic. Passive mode, for instance, do not just involve hardscapes such as buildings, but also softscapes like landscaping and vegetation. Furthermore, power-operated solutions include technologies of different energy intensities, from low-energy fanning and evaporative technologies to high-energy conventional air-conditioning.
We aim to address “environment” at different scales—e.g. built, urban, and planetary—and if possible, trace their connections. The cooling of one environment might lead to the warming of another, for example: i.e. air conditioning the interior environment of a building might mean putting waste heat to the exterior and exacerbating the urban heat island effect. Furthermore, as air-conditioning is an energy-intensive technology, its use contributes to an increase in carbon emission, as most of the world’s electricity is still generated from fossil fuels that worsen global warming. Hence, one of the key questions of cooling the environment in a time of the climate crisis is: how do we cool ourselves without further warming the planet? To answer this question, we seek to examine cooling technologies and the environments created in relation to what Nicole Starosielski calls “thermal cultures” in which certain thermoceptive regimes are cultivated to further specific social and political ends through biological and environmental manipulations. Such situated understandings of the techno-enviro-politics of cooling are essential to any thinking about the future of cooling in a low carbon world.   

Southeast Asia in Latin American Scholarship 

More Information : https://ari.nus.edu.sg/events/20230228-latin-american-scholarship/

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Maitrii V. Aung-Thwin, Asia Research Institute, and Department of History, National University of Singapore

PROGRAM

10:00 WELCOME REMARKS

Assoc Prof Maitrii V. Aung-Thwin | National University of Singapore

10:05

PANEL 1 – WHAT IS THE STATE OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES IN LATIN AMERICA?

Asst Prof Carol Chan | Universidad Mayor

Prof Chris Lundry | El Colegio de Mexico

Prof Fernando Pedrosa | University of Buenos Aires

11:00 PANEL 2 – WHAT ARE THE RESOURCES AND TRAINING AVAILABLE IN LATIN AMERICA?

Prof Evi Yuliana Siregar | El Colegio de Mexico

Prof Ezequiel Ramoneda | National University of La Plata

11:30 END

ABSTRACT

Outside of Southeast Asia, there is a long tradition of Southeast Asian Studies in places such as the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, China, Korea, and Australia. Latin America, however, has become another player in Southeast Asian Studies, with active research nuclei in Mexico, Argentina, and Chile. This virtual roundtable event will revolve around two key questions: What is the state of Southeast Asian Studies in Latin America? What are the resources and training available in Latin America? This dialogue will take place with the scholars of the Inter-Asia Engagements cluster of the Asia Research Institute at NUS, which studies Asia’s engagements with other parts of the world through the perspectives of disciplines such as history, geography, political science, and international relations. It houses several Southeast Asianists who are interested in learning about the research being conducted in Latin America and future possibilities of collaboration.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Carol Chan is Assistant Professor at the Society and Health Research Center, Universidad Mayor (Chile), and lead researcher at the Transpacific Research Network (https://getranspacifico.com/). She earned her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of In Sickness and in Wealth: Migration, Gendered Morality, and Central Java (2018, Indiana University Press), and co-author of Chineseness in Chile: Shifting Representations in the Twenty-First Century (2022, Palgrave MacMillan). She currently leads a research project funded by the Chilean National Agency for Research and Development, titled “Mobilizing Asia-Latin America as Method: A Multi-Sited Ethnography of Migration Infrastructure and Brokerage between Southeast Asia and Chile” (2020-2023). Her research interests include migration, gender, racialization, precarious and forced labor, and inter-ethnic conviviality.

Chris Lundry is a professor-investigator in the Centro de Estudios de Asia y África at El Colegio de Mexico. He works in Southeast Asia, predominantly eastern Indonesia and Timor-Leste. His interests include comparative politics, international relations, revolution and separatism, post-conflict reconciliation, religion and politics, terrorism, colonial Southeast Asia, and film. He has co-authored an award-winning book on rumors and terrorism, and authored and co-authored several book chapters and articles that have appeared in American Behavioral Scientist, Contemporary Islam, Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context, Small Wars Journal, Asian Politics and Policy, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and Estudios de Asia y África, among others. His book Enfrentando a Leviatán. Soberanía impugnada en el este de Indonesia (El Colegio de Mexico) is forthcoming (2022). He is a member of the Comité Consultivo for the Anuario Asia Pacifico. He received his doctorate in political science from Arizona State University in 2009.

Fernando Pedrosa got his bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Salamanca. He coordinates the Asia and Latin America Study Groups of the Instituto de Estudios de América Latina y el Caribe of the Facultad de Ciencias Sociales of UBA and is the head editor of the journal Asia/AmericaLatina. He teaches Southeast Asian politics in the Faculty of Social Sciences of UBA and is Professor of International Relations at the Universidad del Salvador. He was also a guest researcher at the University of Malaya. He has supervised research projects and theses on Asia, both at the master’s and doctoral level. He has peer reviewed and published articles in academic journals, with several of his texts being translated to English and German. He is the author, co-author, or editor of seven books, among them Revisiting the Falklands/Malvinas question: transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives published by the University of London Press and Desafíos actuales en Asia Oriental: lecciones para América Latina, published by the Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires. His contributions regularly appear in media in Latin America and France 24 in Spanish.

Evi Yuliana Siregar is Professor at the Center for Asian and African Studies of El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico City. She studied Indonesian literature for her bachelor’s degree and education for her master’s and doctoral degree. From 1991 to 1997 she worked at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Indonesia. In 1997 she was invited by El Colegio de Mexico as a visiting professor for Southeast Asian Area Studies program and three years later she was hired as a full-time professor there. She works on language, literature, gender, and culture in Indonesia, but recently has focused her research on higher education and educational policy in Indonesia. She is a pioneer in translation of Indonesian literary works into Spanish. Among her publications in translation are Sri Sumarah and El Regreso de Karman (Kubah). Now she is preparing to publish Reform of Higher Education in Indonesia and Higher Education in Southeast Asia.

Ezequiel Ramoneda is the coordinator of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CESEA) and secretary of the Department of Asia and the Pacific (DAYP) of the Institute of International Relations (IRI) of the National University of La Plata (UNLP). He is also Professor and Researcher at the School of Oriental Studies (EEO) of Salvador University (USAL) and at the master’s program in Economics and Business in Asia-Pacific and India of the National University of 3 de Febrero (UNTREF). Furthermore, he is a member of the Group for Asia and Latin American Studies (GESAAL) of the Institute for Latin America and the Caribbean Studies (IELAC) of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and of the Board of the Argentine section of the Latin American Association for Asian and African Studies (ALADAA Argentina).