“Writers and Myanmar conflict“

Date: January 22, 2025 (Wednesday)

Time: 06:00 – 07:00 PM (Melbourne Time)/01:30-02:30 PM (Myanmar/Yangon Time)

Zoom: here

Ma Thida is a human rights activist, surgeon and writer who was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment for endangering public peace, distributing unlawful literature and having contact with illegal organisations. She was released in 1999 after facing 6 years of harsh conditions. She is currently chair of PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee. She continues to speak out about the current difficult environment for freedom of expression and the cases of other writers in prison in Myanmar.

Michelle Aung Thin is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication, teaching in the disciplines of Communication and Creative Writing. Her research spans in cultural history of colonial mixed-race groups such as the Anglo-Burmese, Anglo-Indians, Zerbadi and other Asian diaspora in cosmopolitan Rangoon to contemporary Myanmar literary production. She has taught writing in Mandalay and Yangon and more recently, collaborated with Myanmar artists, writers and translators on creative and academic works. Michelle has been a guest at southeast Asia and Australia’s most prestigious literary festivals and events. Michelle was born in Burma and her personal connection to the region enable her to offer insight into cross-cultural creative practices. 

Questions and Answers will follow the presentations. For more information about AMI, please visit aummi.edu.au/.

This week’s New Pubs features Campbell on how the coup enables labor exploitation in Thailand; Rellensmann w/ a book on the way the military regime has appropriated Buddhist sacred spaces; and Cerretani on transnational Rohingya social movements.

See our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks, and if anyone wants a PDF but is excluded by pay wall, please email us and we will help if we can.

This week’s New Pubs features articles on education in Myanmar – Wong on a decade of crisis and change for English teachers in Burma; Fretheim on faith-based higher ed; and Brown on higher ed in the coup context.

See our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks, and if anyone wants a PDF but is excluded by pay wall, please email us and we will help if we can.

We have now been doing “New Pubs” for a while, and the pubs are piling up. We don’t claim to be exhaustive, but otoh, we have amassed quite a few of them! Take a look at our archive here.

This week’s New Pubs features Venker considering litigation as an act of citizenship in colonial Burma; Cornish on forcibly resettled Yangonites, 25 years later; and the venerable Varasiri arguing the Maṅgala Sutta may aid with peacebuilding in Myanmar.

See our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks, and if anyone wants a PDF but is excluded by pay wall, please email us and we will help if we can.

This week’s New Pubs features Ma Thida’s book on the Spring Revolution; Thame’s political theory on constituent power in that revolution; and Scham’s book, “An Archaeology of Persecuted Peoples,” which focuses on mountainous Asia and includes the Rohingya.

See our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks, and if anyone wants a PDF but is excluded by pay wall, please email us and we will help if we can.

This week’s New Pubs features A names only: Abb et al on the BRI in post-coup Myanmar; Aung Naing on emergent citizenship in the context of post-coup social protection; and Abd Jalil and Hoffstaedter on Malaysia schemes for registering (mostly Burmese) refugees.

See our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks, and if anyone wants a PDF but is excluded by pay wall, please email us and we will help if we can.

Scott, James C. In Praise of Floods, Yale University Press, 2025.

see here for all of the books that don’t exist yet

This week’s New Pubs features the compellingly titled “Calibrated Engagement” by Huard, a classic Burma village study; Chowdhooree and Ferdaus on Rohingya women’s entrepreneurship in Bhasan Char; and Tansey and Plunkett on ASEAN’s willingness to ignore the global anti-coup norm.

See our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks, and if anyone wants a PDF but is excluded by pay wall, please email us and we will help if we can.

“David Steinberg, a long term Burma observer, born 1928, died at age 96 on 6 December 2024. He was a continual contrarian, insisting on analyzing the country through neither military nor oppositional perspectives – a position that, not unexpectedly, often earned him few friends in either camp. Yet, he was also humble regarding his incomplete knowledge of the country, and likewise was generous to younger scholars, encouraging them to learn the language, live in the country, and thereby go beyond his own understanding of Myanmar. He will be missed.” – Elliott Prasse-Freeman

see here for the WaPo obit