This week in New Pubs we have a short piece by Takahashi on metal musical instruments in Myanmar; Khin Thazin and Campbell on how the coup has impacted Myanmar migrant workers abroad; and a new edited volume by Hussain on encamped Rohingya life.
As always, see our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks.
In this week’s Deep Cuts we have the first of a two-part series featuring analyses of Burma’s education system through the years. The first is Salem-Gervais and Metro’s examination of the changes in Myanmar’s school curricula from the BSPP period through the SPDC one. What is shocking is the amount of pruning of content on non-Bamar peoples. At one point the authors ask, acidly, “Since the national races are portrayed as being completely unified politically, one may begin to wonder what differentiates them at all” (2012:52).” Myo Oo compares two specific textbooks during the independence period, an era which he argues is understudied. He finds an apparent contradiction: the history book analyzed asserts that many ethnicities consolidated into a homogenous population in Myanmar; the civics book, by contrast, articulates liberal principles of governance that displace the importance of national identity.
See here for the PDFs.
This week in New Pubs we have Luong featuring voices of opium farmers; Pederson on how the coup has rent Myanmar apart; and Ye Myo Hein on the revolution’s အရှိန်အဟုန်
As always, see our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks.
| ISEAS Webinar by Thailand & Myanmar Studies Programmes |
| Time: 3.00 pm to 4.30 pm (Singapore time) |
| register here. |
| About the Webinar: Recent protest movements in both Myanmar and Thailand have met with digital repression meant to deter or curb the movements’ activities and to undermine their support. In an era when on- and off-line mobilization frequently intersect, that repression has been instrumental in attempts to suppress pro-democracy activism. In Myanmar, online campaigning against the State Administration Council regime that seized power in February 2021 has been met with Internet shutdowns, blocking and removal of online content, and digital surveillance. Ownership changes in the telecommunications sector threaten to increase the junta’s control of the Internet. In Thailand, military-backed regimes have long blocked contentious online content, weaponised computer-related lawsuits against dissidents, consolidated surveillance infrastructure, and deployed cyber troops to manipulate social media. Digital repression has intensified in the aftermath of the country’s 2020-2021 youth-led protests. This webinar will address digital repression in Myanmar and Thailand, the intertwining of digital and traditional approaches to repression, and its impact on protest movements. It will consider how Myanmar and Thai protest movements have countered regime efforts to stifle digital activism. |
| Thinzar Shunlei Yi is a democracy activist and human rights defender. The first woman coordinator of Myanmar’s National Youth Congress and a two-term president of the Yangon Youth Network, she is the advocacy coordinator for the Action Committee for Democracy Development, a coalition of twelve community-based social and political networks established in 2013 to build a democratic federal state in Myanmar. Until January 2021, Thinzar was a host of “Under 30 Dialogue”, an online advocacy platform for young people in Myanmar broadcast on Mizzima TV. With Guillaume Pajot, she is co-author of “Mon combat contre la junte birmane”, published in December 2021. Janjiira Sombatpoonsiri is Visiting Fellow in ISEAS’s Media, Technology and Society Programme; Assistant Professor and Project Leader at the Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok; and an associate at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies. Her research focuses on nonviolent activism and civic space in the context of democratization and autocratization and on digital repression. She is the author of Humor and Nonviolent Struggle in Serbia (Syracuse University Press, 2015) and editor of the journal PROTEST. Her affiliations included membership of the Digital Democracy Network of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. |
This is one of the most underrated books on activism in Burma – not sure why it has not received more attention. Perhaps because the author is a journalist rather than a minted PhD, and hence the book did not make it onto the radar of academics? It’s a shame, because it is a fantastic account of activism under the regime and during the early transition period.
The PDF of the proofs version is on our page (there are some geographical errors that got cleaned up in copy editing phase). It’s the only copy I have, but if anyone else has a better copy to brazenly pirate, because we are equal opportunity like that, please do share.
Authors are encouraged to submit abstracts on the meeting theme—”𝐀𝐝𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞”—and current and emerging mental health issues in Southeast Asia. Empirical (qualitative, quantitative, mixed-method), theoretical, and clinical case studies are welcomed.
All oral presentations are considered for a prize if the papers are submitted full-text (5000-8000 words) before the conference. Prizes consist of 𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 on polishing and publishing the paper and 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐥 𝐟𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐬 (flight, hotel, visa) to an approved scientific conference in their discipline.
𝐒𝐮𝐛𝐦𝐢𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐚𝐛𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞: https://seamentalhealth.com/submit-abstract
Deadline: 𝟑𝟎 𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞, 𝟏𝟏:𝟓𝟗 𝐩𝐦 (GMT+7)
This week in New Pubs we feature a number of scholars of South Asia discussing the position of Burma in their sub-region; David et al on the way ethnic relations have improved post-coup; and Cheesman with a historical study of the penal colony in the Coco Islands (if I’m not mistaken, vernacular Burmese for “life sentence” is တစ်သက်တစ်ကွန်းပြစ်ဒဏ် – “punishment of life on an island”).
As always, see our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks.
Han Htoo Khant Paing and Richard Roewer. “Fighting the Fear: The Execution of Members of Myanmar’s Opposition Must be Stopped.” The Diplomat, 7-June-2022.
A Rockstar Dies in the Myanmar Jungle by Jacky Ahn Yang and Naomi Gingold from the new Asia storytelling podcast Not the Cat.
Last week’s DC featured Nemoto’s complication of the Do-Bama (see here). We complement that article this week with a book from the same era, Pu Kalay’s Kabya Pyetthana (Mixed-Race Problems), which identifies the risk to the nation of miscegenation. While the title implies the perils of all racial intermixing, this book only zeroes in on the unions between Burmese and South Asians (the introduction by U Hla encourages a broader treatment in the future). Even with this narrow remit, when read deconstructively, kabya acts as a kind of diagnostic, throwing into relief the way that racial systems are understood by those who live in them (or at least write about them).
As long as we are on the theme of kabya, we might re-examine Deep Cuts #14, which featured the entire Burmese Lives volume. In there Ma Thida (Sanchaung) has an essay entitled “A Mixed Identity, a Mixed Career,” in which she discusses her own Shan / Chinese background and the way it becomes irrelevant for her as she thinks of herself “as a citizen of Burma, not as any ethnic nationality” (206). We might compare this with Sai Kheunsai (DC #12) who had a very different experience with his Shan-ness.
See here for PDFs.
Burma Studies Group 