Tuesday 05 April 2022; 12.30PM–2PM; more information here, and see here for our full calendar.

We just finished an invigorating conference at AAS – look out for our newsletter, coming relatively soon, that will cover the panels on Burma Studies and highlight what we discussed at our Business Meeting. 

But first, this week in BSG Pubs we feature Su Mon Thazin Aung’s analysis of what’s going on between the NUCC and the NUG/CRPH; Maber et al on the precarious politics of teacher ed in Myanmar; and Liyun Wendy Choo’s take on Bama privilege. See here for full citations: https://burmastudiesgroup.wordpress.com/recent-publications-2/. 

Hosted by Frontier Myanmar | 30 March (Wed); Facebook information here;

This week in Deep Cuts we shine light on Maxime Boutry’s diverse work. The practicing anthropologist and scholar has studied Moken, Rohingya, land dynamics in places as varied as the dry zone and the Delta with his work with GRET, and has also done some of the most interesting research on urban precarity in Yangon that we have seen (and all of this is just his English language research; he writes in French too!). We feature two of his chapters, the first that deconstructs Bama-ness, especially outside of “Bama” spaces (an absolute hidden gem), the second on auto-construction on the peripheries of Yangon.

see here for the PDFs, and all the PDFs from our series.

see here for more information on MA and PhD scholarships available through the MyClimate research project

This week in BSG Pubs we feature K.Z Oung, a historian dismissed for his CDM involvement, whose work includes refiguring Arakan’s past in a book called Refiguring Arakan’s Past; Chowdhury and Abid on Rohingya boat people; and Bhullar on the way that Rohingya are represented in global discourse. See here for full citations: https://burmastudiesgroup.wordpress.com/recent-publications-2/.

In 1938 Thakin Po Hla Gyi led one of the largest anti-capitalist / anti-colonial worker actions in Burma’s history. Nicknamed The Ogre, PLG wrote Strike War to raise funds for the strikers but also to incite the rest of the country’s workers and peasants to revolution.

The text is provided in Burmese and translated into English by ရဲေဘာ္ Stephen Campbell, whose own work on worker movements and daily life in Myanmar is clearly inspired by Thakin Po Hla Gyi. The translation is part of a broader series called the Myanmar Literature Project that includes translations of other old, but hopefully not forgotten, Burmese texts.

See here for the PDF and for our entire series.

For reasons that escape us, AAS has not listed the papers at the Theravada studies meeting in their program, and there is a risk that people attending (or not) may not know about them. Risk averted!:

Saturday 3/26, 2:15-3:45 (Hawai’i time); room 306A (zoom link TBA)

• Mary Kate Long, “Reconsidering Renunciation: Models of Practice and Devotion in Biographies of Myanmar Buddhist Women”
• Olivia Porter, “Thai Zawti Theravada Buddhist Tradition in the Myanmar-China Border”
• Anthony Scott, “The Optics of Enlightenment: Capturing Nirvana in Twentieth-Century Southeast Asia”

See here for more information and it is now on our calendar as well, which you can see here.

The Department of Asian and North African Studies of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Marco Polo Center for Global Europe-Asia Connections are pleased to offer a Summer School on Social Movements in Contemporary Southeast Asia.

The Summer School will be held in Venice, Italy, on September 18 to 24, 2022.

see here for more information.

With a week to go before the AAS meeting, here’s another reminder to please pay your BSG dues! https://members.asianstudies.org/donate-now?id=825e404a-0f34-eb11-8441-501ac55528ed&reload=timezone. Here’s an explanation of what the dues support.

For those who will be in Hawai’i, we will have an in-person meeting on Saturday night (7:30pm to 9, March 26th, room: Hibiscus 1). We will provide a zoom link for those who want to participate in the meeting remotely. Stay tuned.

After the meeting we will have the traditional BSG party, which tends to involve sing-alongs and general revelry. All are invited.