This week’s New Pubs features South’s book on Myanmar’s federalism amidst conflict, complexity, and climate change; Roy et al on “middle powers” as peacemaking entrepreneurs in Myanmar from 2011-2021; and Rogerse et al on the USA’s role in post-coup Myanmar given its concerns about China.
As ever, 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.
TITLE: “Education in Chin State Amid Political Conflict: Catalyst or Obstacle to Progress?”
TIME: Friday, October 20, 5-6pm (AEDT) (UTC+11), 12.30- 1.30pm MMT, 11.30am-12.30pm IST
ABSTRACT: Educational service is one among sectors impacted by the 2021 military coup. By the end of 2022, the UN estimated that around 3.7 million children in Myanmar were left out-of-school due to the ongoing conflict. Chin state, the nation’s least developed yet most diverse region, is among the hardest-hit regions, with a quarter of its population displaced due to armed conflict. Drawing from a range of primary and secondary sources, this presentation discusses the pre-and post-coup educational landscape in Chin state. While it highlights the emergence of educational initiatives amid the political crisis, it also addresses cautionary concerns essential for the long-term peace and development of the Chin community and Myanmar. The coup led to widespread public boycotts of government schools, resulting in closures and higher dropout rates. In response, Chin communities have developed alternative education approaches, some intended just to bridge the gaps while others aimed to develop a system that includes mother-tongue-based instruction, localized curricula, and decentralized management. However, detachment from central authority poses obstacles for certificate recognition. Ongoing armed clashes and transportation blockades add to the difficulties in supplying these non-state schools and ensuring their sustainability. Further complicating matters are issues of limited coordination and competition for scarce resources among various Chin organizations, which poses challenges to sustainable peace and development in Chin state beyond the armed struggle against the junta. The discussion provides insights into the broader conflict trajectory in Myanmar, with consequences extending to neighboring regions and countries.
SPEAKER: Peter Suante hails from the Chin/Zo indigenous community in Myanmar. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Hong Kong and is a dedicated scholar specializing in education policy, with a focus on the non-state sector. Peter is also a passionate advocate for the educational rights of marginalized and conflict-affected children. His recent publications on education in Myanmar are in the Asia Pacific Journal of Education (2022, with Mark Bray) and Paedagogica Historica (2022). Peter is in Australia as the second recipient in 2023 of a short term visiting fellowship inaugurated and jointly run by the ANU’s MRC and the Myanmar Research Network at the University of Melbourne, with support from the International Development Research Centre, Canada.
This week’s New Pubs features a volume edited by Sudo and Yamahata with articles on Myanmar by Seekins (Russia/Burma relations), Hartley (Japan/Burma relations), and Tsukamoto (Burma and Thailand’s coup-proneness); and Kaloyanides on the militarization of Burma’s most beautiful book.
As ever, 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 van Schendel on Bengali influence in South Asia (including reflections on Rohingya); Goodhand et al on drugs, frontier capitalism, and illicit peasantries in Kachin; and Garnett on ASSK as democracy icon and demagogue.
As ever, 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 Keeler on masculinity and monkhood in Myanmar; Panthamit et al on the role of hundis in facilitating cross-border payments; and Thein‐Lemelson on white shirts as sacred amulets for Burmese activists.
As ever, 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.
source: the internet
5th October, 2023 at 7 PM (Myanmar Time).
𝐀𝐛𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭: It is widely acknowledged that the armed struggle against the Myanmar military regime is shaped by societal dynamics, including forms of oppression and violence that date back decades. But the reverse is less well-understood: to what extent have experiences of armed conflict shaped Myanmar society? And, acknowledging both the existence of generations-long self-determination struggles and the dramatic rise in armed conflict since the coup, how can Myanmar’s history and future be understood in the light of its diverse geographies of war? Building on ethnographic and geographical approaches to conflict studies, and reflecting on research done with civil society organisations in Karen State before the coup, this talk will discuss the importance of understanding spaces of conflict as diverse but interrelated, even when there appears to be a single enemy ̶ the junta. It will challenge ahistorical accounts of the war in Myanmar, which can privilege dominant actors, and instead foreground how conflicts interact with preexisting socio-ecological relations, and how actors form communities, care for one another, and enact solidarity, even amidst violence. The talk closes by reflecting on the limits of what researchers – particularly those not from Myanmar – can know about everyday experiences of war and violence.
𝗔𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗿: Dr. Shona Loong is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Zurich where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in political geography. Dr. Loong studies conflict transformation, peacebuilding, and the politics of international development, and has published extensively on these topics, particularly on Myanmar and its peripheries. Her work has appeared in various geography and social science journals, including Political Geography, Geoforum, and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Dr. Loong is also an editor of the Tea Circle and is a frequent contributor to policy reports on Myanmar.
“Surviving the State: Struggles for Land and Democracy in Myanmar”
Sept 29 @ 12:00p (EDT)
Hilary Faxon, assistant professor of environmental social science, University of Montana
𝐀𝐛𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭: Surviving the State examines environmental justice, land governance, and state-making from the vantage point of small farmers and grassroots activists struggling for land during Myanmar’s democratic turn. During Myanmar’s attempted political transition in the 2010s, land was the basis not only of smallholder livelihoods and national development, but also a critical domain for negotiating citizenship after half a century of authoritarian violence and racialized exclusion. Turning on its head a rich tradition of scholarship that posits land as a tool for state-making or an outlet for state-escape, I argue that land is key to what I call surviving the state, a set of socioecological practices forged through cultivation and dispossession as well as the gendered work of care and connection. This talk will draw on my book project, based on 26 months of participant observation, over 150 interviews, and five participatory research and art projects, to show how embodied histories of state violence shaped ecologies and communities, ultimately undermining reforms that aimed to formalize property, redistribute land and recognize ethnic territory. In the aftermath of Myanmar’s 2021 military coup, these findings demand reimagining land not just as a resource for survival, but also as a site of revolution and healing.
Hilary Faxon is an assistant professor of environmental social science at the University of Montana, currently on leave as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen. Her research, teaching and public scholarship investigates environment, development and technology with a focus on social justice in the Global South. She also leads a research project on small farmers and big tech in Myanmar and co-lead two interdisciplinary research groups: one focused on digital transformations in property and development, the other on the ethics and practices of algorithmic conservation.
This week’s New Pubs features a trifecta of feminist Myanmar analysis: Hedstrom et al employing photo-voice to allow female farmers to illustrate their post-coup lives; Frydenlund on Burmese refugees’ labor arrangements in the USA; and Saltsman on the gendered geopolitics of responding to / preventing GBV amongst Burmese displaced in Thailand;
As ever, 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.
figure 1 from Hedstrom et al.
“Musical Means: Cultural Techniques of Disentangling in Littoral Myanmar”
Friedlind Riedel
Date / Time: Tuesday, September 26 at 7:30 pm Newfoundland time (22:00 UTC)
Description:
This talk navigates the conceptual waters between two texts: the commentarial works on the Theravāda Abhidhamma by fifth-century philosopher Buddhaghosa, and the musical drama U Shin Gyi, Lord of Brackish Waters by librettist Ko Maung Gyi, which was published in 1905 and is staged to this day by theatrical companies or lay performers on makeshift stages along Myanmar’s littoral coast.
In keeping with the dramatic setting and the eponymous hero of the second text, the talk sets sail in brackish waters, a zone of elemental indistinction where mangrove swamps interlace land and sea and where heterogeneous domains of clean water and turbid water, nature and culture are quite literally fluid. In entangled worlds such as these, where distinctions and categories are not given in advance in the order of things, a basic principle of Abhidhamma thought becomes evident: namely, that it requires tools and techniques of parsing and disentangling—just like a “man standing on the ground and taking up a well-sharpened knife might disentangle a great tangle of bamboos” as Buddhaghosa puts it—to discern and distinguish fundamental entities, categories, and relations. In the musical drama, the tool at hand is not a knife but a musical instrument, the saung gauk (curved harp). Since harps operate quite differently from knifes and since techniques of music making differ sharply from techniques of mindfulness, these procedures each fashion very distinct modes of existence.
This talk takes propositions from Abhidhamma thought, ones that thoroughly destabilize the epistemic frameworks that undergird much scholarship on music and sound, as its point of departure. Close attention to the operational logic of the Burmese harp, however, complicate any simple correspondence between Buddhist thought and musical practice.
Bio: Friedlind Riedel is a researcher at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar working on her monograph “Staging listening: Histories and Techniques of Musical Drama in Myanmar” which is based on longitudinal ethnographic and archival research. She is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures and has published extensively on music and atmosphere. Her current work sits in the midst of Theravada Buddhist thought, media philosophy, (ethno-)musicology and sound studies.
“Between Bama and Batha: Considering religious racialisation in colonial Burma”
Speaker: Matthew Venker, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University
Date: Tuesday 26 September 2023
Time zone: 12-1pm (AEST), 8.30-9.30am MMT
Abstract
Scholarship on Myanmar, from its colonial history, to its citizenship crises, and the 2021 coup, has heretofore critically interrogated the relationship between ethno-racial identity and socio-political power. However, we have yet to address one important question: what exactly is the difference between ‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’ in the context of Myanmar? This dialogue proposes the utility of reading Burmese history through the analytic lens of critical race theory to identify ethnicity and race as separate, though related, social processes, each with distinct ramifications. This talk will present new research on family law litigation involving mixed Chinese-Burmese Buddhist families in the wake of the ‘British Burma Law’s Act’ (1898-1948) to make the case that racialisation in Burma is drawn along lines of religious rather than ethnic distinction, and that it has historically been drawn along highly gendered lines.
Matthew Venker is a cultural anthropologist studying the historical intersections of race, religion, and citizenship in Burma. His dissertation, Racial Categories, Religious Distinctions: Mixed Buddhists and the Burma Laws Act 1898-1947, interrogates how British colonial structures created new categories of legal personhood that divided the colony’s Buddhist population. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in May 2023. He is currently a Visiting Fellow with the Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University.
Burma Studies Group 