Research seminar series
The School of Arts & Social Sciences plays host to regular seminars by experts and high-profile presenters. These seminars are open to the public.
Find details of upcoming seminars, past seminars, as well as others who have spoken at other SASS events.
If you would like to join our seminar mailing list or are interested in delivering a seminar, please contact the relevant staff member you wish to collaborate with from the staff research expertise list.
Research Seminar Series 2026
Research Seminar Series 2025
Research Seminar Series 2024
Research Seminar Series 2023
Research Seminar Series 2022
Research Seminar Series 2021
Research Seminar Series (14/2021)
"In the Shadow of State-Led Gentrification: The commercialisation of residential properties in Seoul"
Speaker: Professor Hyun Bang Shin
Date: 24 November 2021 (Wednesday)
Time: 4.00pm (MYT)
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here
Contact person: Ms. Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Dr Koh Sin Yi (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Hyun Bang Shin is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of speculative urbanisation, gentrification and displacement, urban spectacles, and urbanism with particular attention to Asian cities. His books include Planetary Gentrification (Polity,2016), Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement (Policy Press, 2015),
Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience (Routledge, 2021), and Covid-19 in Southeast Asia: Insights for a (post-)pandemic world
(LSE Press, 2021). He is the Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation. Personal web
Abstract
This talk examines the rise and deepening of commercial gentrification in Seoul, South Korea, which has developed in the context of speculative urbanisation that has characterised South Korea’s urban accumulation in recent decades.
Building upon the findings of a case study situated in central Seoul, Professor Hyun put forward arguments that are two-fold. Firstly, he argues that the rise of commercial gentrification in recent years is a by-product of decades-long new-build gentrification. Secondly, the Korean version of commercial gentrification distinguishes itself from the retail or commercial gentrification of the West, exacerbating the conditions of living through exclusionary displacement that reduces affordable housing stocks.
Professor Hyun concludes by reflecting upon the theoretical contributions that can be made by the study of commercial gentrification in South Korea.
Research Seminar Series (13/2021)
"Migrant decision-making: The Choice of Malaysia as a Popular Destination by Nepali Migrants"
Speaker: Ms Sharmini Nathan
Date: Tuesday, 2 November 2021
Time: 5.00pm (MYT)
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Dr Marek Rutkowski (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Shamini Nathan, Sharmini Nathan is a researcher at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. Her research interests include exploring South- South migration and the complex challenges that developing countries face not only as countries of origin, but also as countries of destination.
Abstract
In this seminar Shamini Nathan will talk about The empirical study of migrants, their adaptive capacities, the policy environment they face upon entry into the host country, the relations between migrants and the local population, as well as the political, economic, and social implications of international migration is a subject area of enormous significance in today's globalized world. International migration has been, and will be an ongoing phenomenon producing major transformative effects on communities and states voluntarily or involuntarily receiving migrants. Migrant perceptions, knowledge and decision-making, with specific reference to socio-psychological, subjective, emotional and cognitive aspects of migration in the Global South is under-studied. With restrictions in the Global North, South-South migration has become increasingly popular. One of the key research objectives of the MIDEQ (Migration for Development and Equality) Nepal-Malaysia Corridor is to investigate the decision-making environment and process of Nepali migrant workers in choosing Malaysia as their preferred destination. For the SASS research seminar series, I will therefore discuss the emerging themes in migrant decision-making from the responses received during interviews as to why Malaysia is a popular destination for employment with Nepali migrant workers.
This research project is part of the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) Migration for Development and Equality Hub or MIDEQ, funded by the United Kingdom Research Innovation (UKRI). For more information on the research, please visit mideq.org
Research Seminar Series (12/2021)
"The Public and Personal Rights of Muslim Women in Malaysia: Findings from the survey on Muslim women's realities in Malaysia"
Speaker: Ms Rozana Isa
Date: Tuesday, 26th October 2021
Time: 12.00pm (MYT)
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Ms.Vizla Kumerasan (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Rozana Isa is currently the Executive Director for Sisters in Islam, a Malaysian NGO working on women’s rights within the framework of Islam. She is also with Musawah, the global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family. She joined the Malaysian women’s rights movement in 1999 to address violence against women. This exposed her to challenges women face to have their rights recognised and exercised in a context of Islamisation within a democratic nation with parallel legal systems, where gender, ethnic, and religious diversities are celebrated in society yet negated at different levels of policies and laws. Before taking up SIS’s helm, Rozana worked with several national, regional, and international women’s rights organisations.
Abstract
In this seminar Rozana Isa will talk about Malaysian Muslim women who are living in unprecedented times. They embrace modernity, aim to live their dreams, journeying on paths forged by many women before them, role models, icons and influencers, whether within their family or beyond. Nevertheless, for many women still, there remains a discomfort within the space to which they are confined, as they struggle to carefully balance between who they are and the idea they have about gender equality and the expectations placed on them by their families, religion and society.
This session will uncover the findings of the national survey conducted in 2019 titled Perceptions and Realities - The Public and Personal Rights of Muslim Women in Malaysia.
Research Seminar Series (11/2021)
"Migration intermediaries: Lessons from the Nepal-Malaysia Corridor"
Speaker: Ms Yvonne Khor Gee Weon
Date: Tuesday, 5th October 2021
Time: 5.00pm (MYT)
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Professor Helen Nesadurai (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Yvonne Khor Gee Weon was born and raised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Prior to joining Monash University Malaysia, Yvonne was a Senior Researcher at a local think tank in Malaysia. She was involved in various research projects related to the drafting of national policies on development by Members of Parliament and Senators.
Abstract
Research on migration intermediaries is more diverse than ever before. The migration process has become more sophisticated and complex due to multiple formal/informal, human/non-human, and state/non-state actors overlapping as intermediaries.
Migration intermediaries can be understood as actors and institutions that foster, facilitate or sustain human mobility. As part of the ‘Migration for Development and Equality Hub’ (MIDEQ) project, my talk explores the roles of intermediaries along the Nepal-Malaysia corridor. I will present preliminary findings on the different state configurations, connections and linkages between intermediaries in facilitating migration from Nepal to Malaysia.
Research Seminar Series (10/2021)
"Gendering Nepal-Malaysia's Migration Corridor"
Speaker: Ms Nadiah Ahmad
Date: Tuesday, 14th September 2021
Time: 5.00pm (MYT)
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Dr Joseph N. Goh (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Nadiah Ahmad is a researcher at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. Her research interests include exploring inequalities in the Global South and evaluating socio-economic or political interventions that address them.
Abstract
This research project aims to discuss the nature of migration in the Global South, with a focus on the Nepal-Malaysia corridor. As the Nepali migrant population is the third largest in Malaysia, it is thus pertinent to explore their migration motives, aspirations and expectations. As part of this, the research evaluates the ways in which migration addresses unique inequalities experienced by Nepali, as well as how they are maintained or exacerbated despite migration. More broadly, the research contributes to growing knowledge on the permanence of temporary migration along this corridor and within the southern Asian region, as well as how this is affected by and in turn, impacts on Malaysia’s socio-economic and political realities.
For the SASS research seminar series, I present current findings on the gender dimensions of Nepal-Malaysia corridor. This includes findings on how gender shapes migratory desires, expectations and decisions, the everyday experiences between Nepali men and women in Malaysia, as well as the extent to which migration positively or negatively reconstructs pre-existing gender inequalities.
This research project is part of the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) Migration for Development and Equality Hub or MIDEQ, funded by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). For more information on the research, please visit mideq.org
Research Seminar Series (09/2021)
"Urban Space and the Movies: Cinemagoing in Kuala Lumpur"
Speaker: Dr Agata Frymus
Date: Tuesday, 17th August 2021
Time: 5.00pm (MYT)
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Dr Kyle Moore (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Agata Frymus is a film historian and a Lecturer in Film, TV and Screen Studies at Monash University Malaysia. She is the author of Damsels and Divas: European Stardom in Silent Hollywood (Rutgers University Press), as well as articles published in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies; Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and Feminist Media Studies, amongst others.
Abstract
By the mid-1970s “every gazetted urban area in Peninsular Malaysia had at least one cinema,” bringing the total number of movie venues throughout the country to 368 (Grenfell 1979). One can extrapolate that the country had approximately one cinema seat for every sixteen inhabitants – the ratio comparable to that of France. By 1978, Kuala Lumpur had more cinemas per capita than its neighbouring city-state, Singapore. Moviegoing played a crucial role in structuring the pleasures of the city, attracting all kinds of audiences: English, Malay, Cantonese and Tamil speakers; men and women; young and old; middle and working-class. The scale of the phenomenon is even more striking if we consider that more and more citizens were getting access to television. Globally, this tended to signal a rapid reduction in moviegoing; in Malaysia, however, that was not the case.
This study combines an analysis of archival materials – popular and trade press – with oral history. As part of this project, I have conducted fifteen, semi-structured, one-hour interviews with Malaysians between the ages of 62 and 78, focusing on their memories of cinema and leisure in Kuala Lumpur. The principle concern was that of the position of cinemagoing in the lives of the interviewees during the 1970s, its relation to collective sociability, but also the role it played in their perceptions of the cityscape as whole. Which cinemas did they patronise, who with, and why? How did cinemagoing of their youth differ from their experience of the metropolis today?
Research Seminar Series (08/2021)
"Managing impressions of culpability: Examining Arul Kanda’s deployment of membership categories in his BFM interview"
Speaker: Dr David Yoong
Date: Wednesday, 28th July 2021
Time: 12.00pm (MYT)
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Ms Kaflina Kamalul (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Dr David Yoong is an independent scholar and education consultant who specialise in research writing and critical discourse analysis. He was Deputy Dean of Research & Development at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya (UM) and Research Associate at the Faculty of Medicine, UM. He is now the Director of DYLiberated Learning Resources.
Abstract
One measure taken by the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) sovereign wealth fund in 2016 to address its corporate and political scandal was to accept an invitation from a radio station, BFM. To show how its CEO, Arul Kanda successfully managed impressions of culpability in this complex and adversarial interview, the analysis uses membership categorisation analysis. In this talk, I discuss three aspects: the downgrades of morally and ethically wrong behaviour, the association of bad behaviour, and the reframing of perceived abnormalities. This research is driven by two purposes: i) to demystify the complex communication of 1MDB and the CEO’s methods in navigating around tough questions, and ii) to contribute to the growing field of accountability interview analysis, especially in the South-East Asian region.
Research Seminar Series (07/2021)
"Kafkaesque cinema in the context of post-fascism"
Speaker: Associate Professor Angelos Koutsourakis
Date: Tuesday, 6th July 2021
Time: 4.00pm (MYT)
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Dr Chrishandra Sebastiampillai (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Angelos Koutsourakis is Associate Professor in Film and Cultural Studies at the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures (University of Leeds) and AHRC research leadership fellow. He is the author of Rethinking Brechtian Film Theory and Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), Politics as Form in Lars von Trier (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) and the co-editor of The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), and Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). He is currently working on a book titled Kafkaesque Cinema (contracted with Edinburgh University Press).
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to examine Kafkaesque cinema within the historical context of post-fascism. Taking as a starting point that Kafkaesque cinema needs to be understood beyond its association with an apolitical aesthetics of mood, I suggest that the Kafkaesque cinematic aesthetic develops themes and motifs from Kafka’s oeuvre, or from authors who can be understood as Kafkaesque, and is rooted in his critique of modernity, but it also extends beyond his work and his historical experiences. Such an approach can enable us to understand the global dimension of the Kafkaesque as it emerges in different geographical spaces and historical periods as a response to the long crisis of liberalism that extends from the late nineteenth century to the present. Here, I intend to focus on Kafkaesque cinema as a response to historical conditions of post-fascism, a term which I will qualify below, through the close reading of three films: Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies, 2000), and Christian Petzold’s Transit (2018). Important interlocutors in the essay are the Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás and the Italian historian Enzo Traverso; both understand post-fascism as a contemporary mutation of classical fascism, but simultaneously as a historical phenomenon that perpetuates the latter’s hostility to the Enlightenment.
Research Seminar Series (06/2021)
"The Big Walk: Detention and migration stories in Britain (Artivism in a pandemic)?"
Speaker: Professor Stephanie Hemelryk Donald
Date: Wednesday, 23rd June 2021
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Dr Jonathan Driskell (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Stephanie Hemelryk Donald FASSA, FRSA is Head of the School of Arts and Social Sciences (SASS) at Monash University Malaysia. In 2018 she co-founded Justice, Arts, and Migration whilst Distinguished Professor (Film and Media) at Lincoln, prior to which she was Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at UNSW (Sydney), where she also served as Academic Lead of the Grand Challenge for Refugees and Migrants. Her book, There’s No Place Like Home: The Migrant Child in World Cinema, won a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award in 2018. Other titles include Childhood and Nation in World Cinema: Borders and Encounters (2017), Inert Cities: Globalization, Mobility and Suspension in Visual Culture (2014), Little Friends: Children’s Film and Media Culture in New China (2005) and Public Secrets: Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China (2000). Her current research looks at images of migration, detention, youth and childhood.
Abstract
Justice, Arts and Migration (JAM) represented an evolution in my long-term research interests, which have encompassed, most notably, cinema and the visual arts, primarily in China, Europe, and Australia; children’s media; and domestic (intra-Chinese) and global migration. The hypothesis being explored in JAM projects is that creative arts practice has a unique power not just to influence public opinion about questions of migration, refuge, and asylum, but actually to change perceptions and so produce new forms of understanding and encourage ethically informed activism.
The longer background to JAM research and engagement is my earlier study of migrant children in world cinema, whose findings were published in the monograph, There’s No Place Like Home: The Migrant Child in World Cinema (2018a). In that work, I developed an ‘action research’ methodology that enriched analyses of cinematic representations of migrant children by juxtaposing them against accounts of film-making workshops she undertook with migrant children in Australia, China and the UK. This work has been further refined in my methodological argument in partnership with the British Film Institute’s Cent Ans de Jeunesse programme of film art and film-making (2019a) and her critique of activist film featuring children (2019b). This combination of critical analysis with engaged creative practice provided the methodological platform for a new programme of work conceived and developed at Lincoln from 2018 onwards. There's No Place Like Home and The Big Walk projects focussed on adult migrants and asylum seekers, as well as children, to explore and explain how practices and strategies across a number of creative arts might help to
- inform and refine public understanding of the experience of contemporary migrants, refugees and asylum seekers
- influence the practice of artists and professional curators as they engage with questions of migration, displacement, detention and hospitality
- inject a cultural and creative dimension into campaigns for the ethical treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. raised public awareness about issues of migration, refuge, and asylum.
In this presentation I will screen extracts from The Big Walk (Davis, 2020) and discuss the strategies that are explored in her work and how they relate to the JAM projects overall.
Research Seminar Series (05/2021)
"Escaping the Golden Age – Pictorial Hermitage and Non-Aspirational Youth Poetry"
Speaker: Associate Professor Yi Zheng
Date: Thursday, 27th May 2021
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Dr Agata Frymus (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Yi Zheng, associate professor of Chinese and comparative literature, the University of New South Wales; honorary lecturer professor, Sichuan University. Selected publications: From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature (Purdue University Press 2011), Contemporary Chinese Print Media: Cultivating Middleclass Taste (Routledge 2013); From Crisis Poetics to Place Fiction: Collected Essays on Modern Chinese Literature, (Huamulan Publishing House 2018), ‘1911 in Chengdu: A Novel History’, boundary 2 (Vol. 47, No. 1 2020: 177-203); ‘The World of Twentieth-Century Chinese Popular Fiction: From Shanghai Express to Rivers and Lakes of Knights-Errant,’ Zhang, Yingjin (ed.), A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature (Wiley-Blackwell 2015: 244-260).
Abstract
Escapist literature usually refers to popular generic forms that encourage flights of fancy. They are understood to foster an imaginative turning away from the real world. This presentation looks at contemporary Chinese escapist genres in the framework of China’s classical utopian hermitage tradition and the idea of escape as non-engagement. Through examples of Lao Shu’s popular pictorials that teach individual spiritual hermitage, and award-winning but non-aspirational campus poetry that deliberately adheres to a circumscribed world vision, it explores what it means for individuals to (want to) escape the Chinese Golden Age (sheng shi).
Research Seminar Series (04/2021)
"Genre Publics: Popular Music, Technologies and Class in Indonesia"
Speaker: Associate Professor Emma Baulch
Date: Tuesday, 11th May 2021
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Dr Tan Meng Yoe (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Emma Baulch is an Associate Professor of Media and Communications at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. Her research is located in the fields of Asian cultural studies and media and communications studies. She is interested in how new media technologies alter and are altered by existing Southeast Asian social formations revolving around race, class and ethnicity. Most of her research work is ethnographic in nature, and attends to the interaction of material and social worlds through a focus on the everyday uses of new media technologies.
Abstract
In this seminar, Emma will be talking about her new book, Genre Publics (Wesleyan UP 2020). The book looks at conceptions of ‘the local’ inherent to Indonesia’s local music boom of the late 1990s. She argues that defining ‘the local’ of the local music boom implicates a class politics with historical roots in Indonesia's 'capitalist revolution' of the 1970s, when popular music genres played a foundational role in class formation. She shows how this history haunts conceptions of citizenship in present-day Indonesia, but also how ideological and technological shifts in the 1990s and 2000s have altered the meanings of popular music genres, reshaping Indonesian senses of the modern in dialogue with democratization and rising consumerism.
Research Seminar Series (03/2021)
"Why do people clean? Reflection of fieldwork on Malaysian Chinese household cleaning practices"
Speaker: Dr Chan Lay Tyng
Date: Tuesday, 13th April 2021
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (webinar link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Associate Professor Yeoh Seng Guan (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Lay Tyng CHAN recently received her PhD in Marketing from Monash University (Malaysia). She is determined to dedicate her research life to improve social and environmental well-being after seeing the bloody images of scrawny polar bear feeding on her own cub in the National Geographic magazine. Her deep concern for social and environmental problems drives her interest to understand everyday practices and market systems which, she believes, carry the seed of social and behavior change. She sees herself as a rebellious and eccentric post-modernist with a particular interest in practice theory, native ethnography, and hermeneutics. A multi-potentialite, Lay Tyng is also the founder of a micro-sized stuffed toy repairing clinic, a home-based vegan food producer and an aspiring story-teller. She is currently carving a path to integrate all the elements that spark joy in her life.
Abstract
The research involves a 20-month ethnography of middle-class Malaysian Chinese families to shed light on household cleaning practices. Drawing on practice theory, and responding to calls for explicit application and reporting of behaviour change research, this research demonstrates how cleaning practices are “locked in” by a system that promotes problematic practices in general. The findings explain why intensive cleaning practices emerged, uncovering a discourse of paranoia that leads to a culture of fear of a dangerous world. Paranoiac culture drives system behavior and market activities, resulting in the need to constantly (re-)negotiate the boundary between the “clean” and safe inside world and “dirty” and dangerous outside world through frequent, repeated, and meticulous cleaning.
Research Seminar Series (02/2021)
"Cultural Mobilities between Queer Taiwan and Sinophone Malaysia"
Speaker: Dr Ting-Fai Yu , Monash University Malaysia
Date: Wednesday, 24th March 2021
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (zoom link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Professor Stephanie Hemelryk Donald (academic matters).
Speaker’s Profile
Dr Ting-Fai Yu is a Lecturer in Gender Studies in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University Malaysia. He is an anthropologist and his research focuses on cultural identities in Chinese-speaking communities across East and Southeast Asia, with reference to questions of gender, sexuality, race, globalisation, and mobility. His most recent research can be found in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, the Journal of Homosexuality, and Sexualities.
Abstract
While Taiwan has been widely regarded as Asia’s gay capital for lifestyle consumption especially by ethnic Chinese people overseas, it has rarely been studied as an exporter of queer discourses and movement tactics that is capable of influencing LGBT communities globally. Based on field research, this paper demonstrates how the formations of queer Taiwan and Sinophone Malaysia are historically connected and mutually productive. On the one hand, it argues that the queer development of Taiwan has significantly shaped LGBT people’s experiences and queer advocacy work in the other parts of the Chinese-speaking world such as and especially those in Malaysia. On the other, it highlights the ways in which Sinophone Malaysia is fundamentally transnational and distinctively queer, in comparison to other linguistic communities, as a result of its historical links to Taiwan.
Drawing on the scholarship on queer Sinophone cultures (e.g. Chiang and Wong 2020; Wei 2020) and media activism (e.g. Bao 2018, 2020), this paper explores two of the areas that have facilitated the cultural mobilities between queer Taiwan and Sinophone Malaysia: namely, Chinese language and digital media infrastructure. First, it demonstrates how the use of Chinese in queer Malaysian activist communities has enabled critical engagements with the happenings in Taiwan while serving an effective function of bypassing state scrutiny in illiberal settings. Second, it argues that the transnational circulation of Taiwan queer cultural texts has played a significant role in the production of queer Chinese Malaysians’ cross-cultural desires, in relation to the development of Malaysian new media, since the 2000s.
Research Seminar Series (01/2021)
"Debunking 'Sick Man of Asia': Negotiating Modern Chinese National Identity through Tourism"
Speaker: Dr I-Chieh Michelle Yang , Monash University Malaysia
Date: Tuesday, 2nd February 2021
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: The seminar will be conducted via Zoom (zoom link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (logistics) and Associate Professor Yeoh Seng Guan (academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Dr I-Chieh Michelle Yang joined Monash University Malaysia as a lecturer in Marketing in 2020 after receiving her PhD in Marketing from Monash University. Her research interest lies in consumer culture in Asia, politicized consumption and tourism marketing. Dr Yang is currently involved in research projects on the politicization of Asian cultural practices and national identity work. Her work has been published in top-ranked journals such as Annals of Tourism Research and Current Issues in Tourism, as well as international conferences such as Consumer Culture Theory Conference and Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management Conference.
Abstract
This seminar explores the nexus between consumer culture and national identity in China. The rise of China and its economic prowess in recent decades have witnessed a phenomenal growth in Chinese outbound tourism. Specifically, the 21st century has seen China’s rise from its previous hardships to become one of the largest economies in the world. The “reform and opening” policy (gaige kaifang) inaugurated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 was aimed at opening China’s doors to foreign investments as well as international communications. Consumerism in China, too, has exponentially expanded, with strong demands for consumer goods and luxury products, making it the world’s largest consumer market. Nevertheless, China’s fall from centuries of imperialism to a series of foreign invasions, internal turmoil and current rising from its past hardships have resulted in a drastic national identity transformation in recent decades. For a collective society such as China, national identity serves as a cornerstone of a person’s sense of self and belonging. Unique to China’s “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”, Gerth (2003) observes that consumer culture plays a potent role in China’s nation-making. Increasingly, China’s national identity and consumer culture serve as two parallel social forces that define each other. As Kuever (2018) notes, China remains an authoritarian and socialist regime with a paradoxically flourishing consumer culture. Chinese consumers increasingly recognize consumption as primary means to define themselves as citizens of a powerful and modern nation by consuming a continuum of products and services. Using international tourism as the consumption context, this research explores how Chinese citizens to negotiate their national identity through international tourism. A multi-method approach guided the data collection from 28 Chinese tourists in three ethnographic group tours. The findings revealed that international tourism offers a platform on which to affirm and express Chinese national identity through the symbolic interaction between Chinese tourists and the world outside of China.
Research Seminar Series 2020
Research Seminar Series (06/2020)
"Screen memories in Post-Soviet cinema"
Speaker: Professor Kristian Feigelson, Sorbonne University
Date: To be confirmed
Time: To be confirmed
Venue: The seminar series will be conducted via Zoom.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Dr Ana Grgic (Academic matters).
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Speaker’s Profile
Kristian Feigelson sociologist, is a Professor in Film Studies at Sorbonne-Nouvelle. He contributed also to different Academic Journals and has published numerous works on film culture. For instance, he has edited different issues of the Film Journal Theoreme, on Hungarian , Russian and Soviet cinema, on Bollywood, on Cinema and Cities... He has also taught in different Universities in Europe , Asia , North and South America. His articles are translated in different countries. His next forthcoming publication «Image Industry in East Asia , between globalisation and local identity ( China/Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Taiwan) » will be published in 2020 by Sorbonne Nouvelle Press University. In 2020, he was invited as a JSPS fellow at Tokyo University to work on a research program « Filming the Gulag » .
Abstract
This seminar on line will explore the different relationships between history and memory in Soviet and Post-Soviet cinema. The last decade, media and cinema contributed to focus in the new Russia on the emergence of mythical narratives and “nationals epics”, rewriting the past. What are the media policies and their use of the past in Russia to-day ? Complex connections which are a legacy of the new Russia’s past and often remain unheard ?
At key moment in history and according the need of the regime, media policy aimed at focusing on narrative threads that identify with these different traditions from the past. For instance at the height of the Stalinian Terror (1937), thanks to cinema, life becomes a veritable fairy tale inspiring the most unlikely of storylines in Soviet films comedies. The main periods of Soviet history have always brought about a particular sort of confrontation with questions of memory. From a retrospective angle, questions may be raised about the chronology of Russian social and political history in their relationship to associated representations in the media. The very use of these different terms (history, memory…) takes us beyond chronology into a more general framework of interpretation between aesthetics and politics and between different public demands, for instance in different periods where there is a more or less pronounced instrumentalisation of the media. In film, where the absence of written history encouraged paradoxical initiatives, this interaction between memory and history always encouraged ambiguities. Eisenstein’s « October », for instance, a party-commissioned film produced in 1927, brought new life to a debate; taking as its starting point an event which certainly overturned Russian society but which had received minimal media coverage when it happened, the film manipulated the course of Soviet history. In the new Russia, in its own way the cinema is again reconstructing the myths and stereotypes of yesterday by turning them on their heads. To a large extent the commercial cinema has therefore made itself into the vector of all the old and new myths of Russian modernity, drawing a large and willing public towards these fictions which are broadcast by the media of this New Russia.
This seminar will pick up this debate regarding the relations between history and memory in film on the basis of different Russian-Soviet examples.
Research Seminar Series (05/2020)
"Observing Trump - A Systems Theoretical Perspective"
Speaker: Dr Markus Heidingsfelder, Xiamen University Malaysia
Date: Tuesday, 29 September 2020
Time: 12pm
Venue: The seminar series will be conducted via Zoom, or go to https://monash.zoom.us/join and enter meeting ID: 932 5153 3516 and password: 718561 . For registration, please click here
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Associate Professor Yeoh Seng Guan (Academic matters)
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Speaker’s Profile
Markus Heidingsfelder is an Assistant Professor in the Journalism Department of Xiamen University Malaysia. He also serves as the co-organizer of the Futures of Media conference series and as the co-director of the Observed with Niklas Luhmann’s Systems Theory conference series. Dr. Heidingsfelder earned his master’s degree with a study of Marshall McLuhan’s work from the University of Cologne. He completed his PhD with a thesis on the fuzzy phenomenon of 'pop' at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich. He held appointments at DJS Munich, FU Berlin, HCU Hamburg, and LMU Munich. From 2014 he was a founding faculty member of Habib University, Pakistan, where he directed the institution's first Communication Studies & Design curriculum. His research explores the dynamic relationship between media and society, relying on a communication theory which understands society as the product of a complex plurality of different observers (minds, machines, swarms, nets, social systems like interaction systems, organizations or functional systems like politics, the law, the mass media etc.). Besides his academic credentials, Dr. Heidingsfelder has over 30 years of overlapping experience as a communications professional.
Abstract
The heated debates about the current American president Donald Trump focus on the person, which is either demonized (as Anti-Christ, wannabe-dictator etc.) or praised (as sent by God, patriot etc.).
Based on key themes from the book "Trump - observed", this session will offer an alternative perspective on the Trump Presidency. Using the method of 2nd order observation, the author takes a closer look at the social structures involved: the immune system of society, values and norms, roles and persons, organisations (such as political parties or media houses) and social functional systems (such as politics, law, economy, mass media and science).
Heidingsfelder’s thesis is that the ‚system conflicts‘ between politics and the other sub-systems of society (economy, law, mass media, and science) are at the heart of what at times has been observed as the ‚Trump crisis‘.
Research Seminar Series (04/2020)
Reflecting on Online Church Communities + Book Launch - Malaysian Christians Online: Faith, Experience, and Social Engagement on the Internet
“Experiencing Spirituality Online, Really?"
Speaker: Dr Tan Meng Yoe, Monash University Malaysia
Date: Tuesday, 28 July 2020
Time: 4.00pm
Venue: The seminar series will be conducted via Zoom (zoom link will be forwarded to the registrants).
For registration, please click here
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Associate Professor Yeoh Seng Guan (Academic matters).
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With an increased focus on the subject of online religion in recent times, it is worth asking the question: Can spirituality be experienced online? Drawing ideas from the book, Malaysian Christians Online, this session will consider a number of factors that can potentially shape the way we think about online Christianity, such as authenticity, authority, community, and materiality.
Speaker’s Profile
Tan Meng Yoe is a lecturer in communication with the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash
University Malaysia. He also currently serves as the course coordinator for the Master of Communication and Media Studies program.
He completed his PhD with Monash University Malaysia in 2014 after being awarded the Higher Degree by Research Scholarship in 2010. His thesis, The Digital Church: Urban Malaysian Christian Experiences in Cyberspace, was on the subject of online Christianity in Malaysia.
His research expertise is in the field of online religion, with related interests in politics and religion in Malaysia. He has studied and published on subjects like blogging and spirituality; religious engagement in online religious communities, and more. His ongoing curiosity is regarding the concept of “reality” in cyberspace, and whether spirituality can be experienced online.
Speaker: Dr Sivin Kit, Program Executive for Public Theology and Interreligious Relations, Department for Theology, Mission and Justice, Lutheran World Federation
Date: Tuesday, 28 July 2020
Time: 4.00pm
Venue: The seminar series will be conducted via Zoom (zoom link will be forwarded to the registrants). For registration, please click here
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Associate Professor Yeoh Seng Guan (Academic matters).
The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is having a profound impact on churches globally, with many churches globally conducting services and other activities entirely online. With such a sudden shift in the church environment, what are some of the highlights, surprises, and challenges that have occured in the online church community during this time? Where does the church go from here?
Speaker's Profile
Rev Dr Sivin Kit currently serves as the Program Executive for Public Theology and Interreligious Relations with the Lutheran World Federation in Geneva. His focus is to pursue strategic theological questions and contribute in areas of religion in the public space, interreligious collaboration, and peacebuilding.
He has a B.Th and M.Theol from the South East Asia Graduate School of Theology; he received his PhD in Religion, Ethics, and Society from the University of Agder, Norway in 2014. Previously, Kit who is an ordained pastor with the Lutheran Church in Malaysia since 2003 served as a lecturer in Christian Theology and Religious Studies at the Malaysia Theological Seminary from January 2015 to June 2019. There he also taught courses on Christian Ethics, Homiletics, and Malaysian Studies.
Additionally, he took on the role as the Director of the Centre for Religion and Society while also being actively involved in civil society, interreligious engagement, and public discussions in the Malaysian new media scene. He has published articles in the fields of public theology, Christian-Muslim relations, ecumenism, and interreligious relations in South East Asia and East Asia. His wider interests includes contextual theology as well as religion and media.
Research Seminar Series (03/2020)
“Conflict, intervention, and tech: Critical perspectives on new technologies in societal conflict in Myanmar and beyond”
Speaker: Dr Stefan Bächtold
Date: Tuesday, 7 July 2020
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: The seminar series will be conducted via Zoom (zoom link will be forwarded to the registrants). To register, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Dr Tan Meng Yoe
(Academic matters).
Speakers' Profile
Dr Stefan Bächtold is an Associated Researcher at swisspeace, specialised in evaluation approaches and collaborative learning processes for conflict-affected environments. He is a scholar, trainer, and evaluator currently based as a visiting post-doctoral fellow at Monash University in Kuala Lumpur.
He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Basel, Switzerland and a MA in social science from the Universities of Fribourg and Berne.
His research focus is on critical/postcolonial approaches, the role of new technologies in conflict, and the power relations that are structuring peacebuilding and aid interventions in Myanmar and globally. Previously, Stefan was swisspeace’s in-country focal point embedded in a local peacebuilding organisation in Myanmar; worked for Terre des Hommes in West Darfur; and at the Institute for Research on Management of Associations, Foundations and Cooperatives at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. In addition to South-East Asia, he has worked in Sudan (Darfur), Palestine (Gaza/West Bank), Bangladesh, and Senegal.
Abstract
In June 2019, the Myanmar government imposed a shutdown of all mobile internet communications in parts of its Rakhine and Chin states. This internet 'blackout' has since turned into one of the world’s longest. While Myanmar has received considerable attention for its political transition, for its peace process, or more recently, for the international criminal court's investigations into accusations of genocide in Rakhine state, interest in the technological dimensions of these change processes have been limited.
This talk takes the 'blackout' as an entry point to critically analyse how new technologies reshape power structures in a context marked by armed conflict, international intervention, and transition. How do actors like the Myanmar government, civil society actors, or tech companies mobilise new technologies in their discourse and specific practices? And how do phenomena like online hate-speech and 'fake news' link to longstanding societal dynamics of inclusion/exclusion?
Rather than providing a fully formulated argument at this point, I would like to present different narratives pertaining to new technologies in societal conflict in Myanmar and explore how they relate to the (very different) context of Malaysia.
Research Seminar Series (02/2020)
“The Institutional Structure and Complexity of International Branch Campuses in Malaysia: A qualitative study”
Speaker: Mr Tirong Yang
Date: Tuesday, 23 June 2020
Time: 10.00am
Venue: The seminar series will be conducted via Zoom (zoom link will be forwarded to the registrants). To register, please click here.
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Prof Helen Nesadurai (Academic matters)
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Speakers' Profile
Tirong Yang was a visiting PhD student at SASS, Monash Malaysia. He received his PhD from the South China Normal University (SCNU) where he serves as the director assistant in the Center for Southeast Asian Studies in SCNU. His research centers around comparative higher education, and education research on Southeast Asia. He spent a year (2018-2019) doing visiting study at the School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Yang is currently involved in research projects on the topics of policies of language education policy, internationalization of higher education.
Abstract
International branch campuses (IBCs) has been the critical actors in realizing the target of making Malaysia an educational hub. While certain types of IBCs from Australia, UK and China have been growing in Malaysia, the collective research on their development requires further effort. This research aims to form a different understanding of IBCs by focusing on their institutional structure and complexity. With a framework of regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive institutions, the researcher conducted a qualitative analysis on the development of IBCs with data collecting from field observation, interview and official websites. The conclusion centers on the structure and complexity of institutions of IBCs in Malaysia.
Research Seminar Series (01/2020)
“What we talk about when we talk about the Paris Agreement: Analogies in Global Environmental Politics”
Speaker: Dr. Nicholas Chan
Date: Tuesday, 18 February 2020
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: Meeting room 2-6-41 (Building 2, Level 6, Room No. 41)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and A/Prof Yeoh Seng Guan
(Academic matters).
Speakers' Profile
Dr Nicholas Chan is Lecturer in Global Studies at Monash University Malaysia and holds degrees in International Relations from the University of Oxford and Aberystwyth University. He specialises in global environmental politics, especially multilateral negotiations on climate change and ocean biodiversity. His most recent publication is Large Ocean States: Sovereignty, Small Islands and Marine Protected Areas in Global Ocean Governance, published in December 2018 in Global Governance.
Abstract
Five years after the Paris Agreement on climate change was adopted, it has rapidly become the focal point for how global climate action is organised. But how has this diplomatic success affected other dimensions of global environmental politics beyond climate change? This paper explores how the Paris Agreement has been used as an analogy, and how diverse actors have interpreted the 'lessons' of the Paris Agreement for the governance of other environmental issue areas, from biodiversity to plastic pollution, chemicals and ocean sustainability: What does the Paris Agreement mean in non-climate contexts? This paper builds on and contributes to the long tradition of reasoning-by-analogy in both International Relations generally and global environmental politics specifically. It explores the social life and the meanings attached to the 'Paris Agreement', and the implications this has for institutional design and global cooperation on issue areas beyond climate change.
Research Seminar Series 2019
Research Seminar Series (10/2019)
“Love in a time of Extinction: Precarity, Food and Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene”
Speaker: Professor Johan Höglund
Date: Wednesday, 30 October 2019
Time: 10.00am
Venue: Meeting room 2-6-41 (Building 2, Level 6, Room No. 41)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Dr. Ana Grgic
(Academic matters)
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Speakers' Profile
Dr Johan Höglund is Professor in English at the Department of Languages, and Director of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. He holds degrees from Brown University and Uppsala University. His research focuses on the relationship between popular culture, the Anthropocene and Empire as it manifests during different eras and in different media. He is the author of The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence (Ashgate, 2014) and editor of B-Movie Gothic: International Perspectives (with Justin Edwards, EUP 2018), Animal Horror Cinema: Genre, History and Criticism (with Katarina Gregersdotter and Nicklas Hållén, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires (with Tabish Khair, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). He has published extensively in journals such as Journal of Popular Culture, Game Studies, English Literature in Transition, Continuum, and The European Journal of American Studies.
Abstract
There is increasing agreement within geology, oceanology, biology and other hard sciences that we have entered the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000), although other concepts, such as Capitalocene (Moore 2015) and Chthulucene (Haraway 2016) have also been proposed. This era is already lodged in the sediments of the Earth, in the form of plastics, ash, metals, pesticides, or as fallout from thermonuclear testing in the late twentieth century (Waters et al. 2016). In the present moment, and even more so in the predictable future, the Anthropocene produces various states of precarity; in the global south where what Rob Nixon (2011) has termed “slow violence” impacts the lives of the poor; among thousands of species that, as Elisabeth Kolbert (2014) shows, are going extinct; and also inside all human bodies when chemicals accumulate in our fat tissue and when our microbiomes – our vital gut bacteria – are depleted by poor diets and an overuse of antibiotics.
From the perspective of the hard sciences, the Anthropocene is a human-induced era generated by the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and by various pollutants and chemicals into the environment. However, this process, and humanity’s current and glaring inability to address the conflict, must also be understood as a cultural or ideological problem. As several humanities and social sciences scholars have observed (see e.g. Lorimer 2015, Tsing 2015, Chakrabarty 2016), the Anthropocene has been enabled by the anthropocentric notion that humankind is somehow apart from nature, and that nature exists to be governed by humanity. The relationship between modern humanity and the planet has thus been one of (colonial) ownership, not of friendship or love, or even of collaborative co-habitation. This prompts the questions: How can humanity, as Eben Kirksey (2018) has asked, learn to extend friendship and love across the barriers constituted by that geography, nationality and species?
With this question in mind, this talk explores new scholarly writing, art, literature and film that attempt to reimagine relations between human beings, and between human and non-human species. The talk thus surveys stories that recognize that humans are inevitably inside the planetary ecosystem, and also inhabited by a range of species vital to their survival. In this way, the talk investigates how visual and textual narratives imagine (interspecies) love and friendship as possible even in an age of conflict and extinction.
Research Seminar Series (09/2019)
“Lessons from Post-Disaster Reconstruction Projects in Southeast Asia”
Speaker: Dr Ruhizal Roosli
Date: Tuesday, 1 October 2019
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: Meeting room 2-6-41 (Building 2, Level 6, Room No. 41)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Associate Professor Yeoh Seng Guan (Academic matters)
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Speakers' Profile
Ruhizal Roosli is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Housing, Building and Planning at Universiti Sains Malaysia, having received a BSc in Housing, Building and Planning from the same institution; Advanced Diploma in Peace Operations and Crisis Management from Institute for International Political Studies, Milan; PGCert in Shelter & Settlement in Emergencies from IFRC/Oxford Brookes University and PhD in Housing Studies from Northumbria University, UK. Currently, he is a visiting researcher at Monash University. He has published extensively in the areas of disaster and development.
Abstract
Post-disaster reconstruction is a complex process and highly demanding that involves a number of different and well-coordinated courses of action. Therefore, it is vital that these complex activities are well planned, subject to thorough consultation and undertaken after effective collaboration with the widest range of members of the affected communities especially among International Non-Governmental Organisations. Learning from the issues and challenges related to past project management practice in Post-Disaster Reconstruction (PDR) projects is a start to understand the best practice suitable for better implementation of PDR project.
Research Seminar Series (08/2019)
“Is Asia still a Unique Case for Theory-building in Social Sciences?”
Speaker: Professor Joern Dosch
Date: Wednesday, 4 September 2019
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: Meeting room 2-6-41 (Building 2, Level 6, Room No. 41)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Associate Professor Yeoh Seng Guan (Academic matters)
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Speakers' Profile
Joern Dosch is a professor of International Politics and Development Cooperation and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Rostock, Germany. His previous positions include Professor of International Relations at Monash University Malaysia, and Head of the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Leeds. In 2016 he was a Visiting Professor at the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His research focuses on Southeast Asian politics and international relations as well as Europe-Asia relations. He has spent extended periods of time in the ASEAN-region since the early 1990s. Prof Dosch’s current research projects explore the foreign policies of the individual ASEAN member states and the future of development cooperation in Southeast Asia. He also regularly works as a consultant for the European Union’s development programme with Asia and has evaluated several donor-funded projects in support of ASEAN. Dosch's recent publications include Malaysia Post-Mahathir. A Decade of Change? Marshall Cavendish 2015 (edited with James Chin) and The ASEAN Economic Community, Nomos 2016 (in German).
Abstract
For the past three decades Asia has been one of the most important empirical hunting grounds for theory-building in political science, international relations, political economy and development studies. The “developmental state”; modernisation theory; the concept of collective social orders (“Asian Values”); the idea of illiberal or defect democracies; key inputs to the discourse on nationalism and nation-building; and the notion of soft regionalism all originated against the backdrop of observed phenomena in Asia. But what has happened to these and other Asia-centric approaches in social sciences? Are they still relevant? Or has Asia become a “normal region” that lost its unique and specific relevance as a prime empirical case for academic theorising and the construction of counter-models which challenge Eurocentric worldviews?
Research Seminar Series (07/2019)
“Reconfiguring the United Kingdom’s transnational education geographies after Brexit: Branch campuses as flexible technology”
Speaker: Dr Jana M. Kleibert
Date: Tuesday, 23 July 2019
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: Meeting room 2-6-41 (Building 2, Level 6, Room No. 41)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Dr Koh Sin Yee
(Academic matters)
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Speakers' Profile
Dr. Jana Kleibert is an economic geographer interested in understanding the changing geographies of globalisation. She heads the "Constructing Transnational Spaces of Higher Education" (TRANSEDU) research group at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS) and at the Humboldt University of Berlin, which investigates the material and discursive construction of European offshore campuses around the world. She received her PhD in economic geography (University of Amsterdam) for a dissertation exploring the formation of global production networks in services through a study of services offshoring to the Philippines. Previously, she has held visiting appointments at the National University of Singapore, the University of Manchester, the Goethe University of Frankfurt/Main and the University of British Columbia.
Abstract
Corporatisation, commercialisation, marketisation and globalisation have been important facets of United Kingdom’s (UKs) higher educations’ transformation over the past decade, making higher education an important economic (export) sector that depends on mobilities of capital, labour and students. The talk focuses on the construction of international branch campuses, as a critical case study through which to understand socio-spatial transformations and contribute to “Brexit Geographies”. Based on qualitative interviews with key decision-makers on transnational higher education in the UK, I analyse the spatial strategies universities employ in situations of crisis and uncertainty over future migration policies and access to research funding. These encompass (a) dis-embedding from domestic regulations through opening international branch campuses, (b) rescaling several activities to branch campuses in the “global city” of London to attract international students, and (c) opening of branch campuses in European Union (EU) countries to become re-embedded in the EU higher education and research space. By linking the contemporary reconfigurations of the economic geographies of UK education to earlier phases of internationalisation, I show how international branch campuses constitute a remarkably flexible technology that enables spatial and territorial fixes at different scales.
Research Seminar Series (06/2019)
“Civil-Military Relations in Myanmar: Guarding, Guiding and Constraining Democratization”
Speaker: Associate Professor Marco Buente
Date: Tuesday, 2 July 2019
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: Meeting room 2-6-41 (Building 2, Level 6, Room No. 41)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Associate Professor Yeoh Seng Guan (Academic matters)
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Speakers' Profile
Marco Bünte is Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Social Sciences, and Co-Director of the Multidisciplinary Research Platform Global Asia in the 21st Century. He is interested in broader questions of regime change and persistence, civil-military relations, constitutionalism and human rights. He has published 2 monopgraphs, co-edited three volumes and written more than 100 articles and book chapters.
Abstract
Myanmar`s democratisation has been seen as a success story countering the global trend of democratic recession and the crisis of democracy in the Western world. The election of the NLD under the leadership of human rights icon Aung San Suu Kyi and the election of the first civilian president seemed to confirm this optimism. The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in 2017 and the ongoing human rights violations in the areas of ethnic minorities paint a completely different picture. This study shows that the lack of civilian control over the military (Tatmadaw) actually has far reaching effects on the country`s young democracy. It disentangles the concept of civilian control and shows systematically how the military is constraining Myanmar`s “disciplined” democracy.
Research Seminar Series (05/2019)
“Developing the Communist Asia: Polish Scientists and the Socialist Modernity in North Vietnam (1957–1960)”
Speaker: Dr Marek W. Rutkowski
Date: Tuesday, 7 May 2019
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: Meeting room 2-6-41 (Building 2, Level 6, Room No. 41)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Associate Professor Yeoh Seng Guan (Academic matters)
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Speakers' Profile
Dr Marek Rutkowski is Lecturer in Global Studies at Monash University Malaysia. He specialises in international history with a particular focus on the Cold War in Asia. Dr. Rutkowski received his PhD in History from the National University of Singapore in 2017. His dissertation analysed the role of international peacekeepers in Indochina in the 1950-60s in the period leading up to the Vietnam War, with the Cold War and decolonisation as a backdrop. His research is primarily empirical and archive-driven, looking at political processes in Asia from a historical perspective. His interests range from diplomacy and peacekeeping to development models and nation-building.
Currently Dr. Rutkowski focuses on turning the dissertation into a book manuscript and embarking on a second research project looking at the Soviet Bloc’s encounters with Asia in the Cold War period in the areas of diplomacy, development and knowledge transfer. Separately, he has been involved in a two-volume book project on Western military powers in Asia in collaboration with scholars from US, UK, Australia and Singapore.
Abstract
While a lot has been written about Western modernisation efforts as a means of winning the Cold War in the decolonised world, few similar research projects have been undertaken with regards to the Soviet Bloc. This talk aims to reflect on the Cold War-era communist development efforts in the Third World through a case study of scientific knowledge transfer and developmental aid from Poland to North Vietnam in the 1950s. Behind the façade of communist internationalism, the study finds a few curious undercurrents that demonstrate that the quest for modernisation within the Soviet Bloc was not free from complications found in Western development efforts - conflicting national interests, enduring stereotypes and the complicated relationship with colonialism.
Research Seminar Series (04/2019)
“Digital Transactions in Asia"
Speaker: Associate Professor Adrian Athique
Date: Thursday, 11 April 2019
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: Meeting room 2-6-41 (Building 2, Level 6, Room No. 41)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Associate Professor Emma Baulch (Academic matters)
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Speakers' Profile
Adrian Athique is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. He is the author of several books on Asia, the media and the digital including The Multiplex in India: A Cultural Economy of Urban Leisure (Routledge, 2010, with Douglas Hill), Indian Media: Global Approaches (Polity, 2012) Digital Media and Society (Polity, 2013) and Transnational Audiences: Media Reception on a Global Scale (Polity, 2016). He is also editor of The Indian Media Economy (2 Vols, OUP, with Vibodh Parthasarathi and SV Srinivas) and, most recently co-edited Digital Transactions in Asia: Social, Economic and Informational Exchanges (Routledge, 2019) with Associate Professor Emma Baulch, Monash University Malaysia.
Abstract
In 2017, the number of Internet users in Asia surpassed those in the rest of the world combined (at 1.9 billion). The same is true of the mobile domain, with almost 4 billion phone subscribers in Asia, making more than half of the global total. In this talk, I consider the digital transactions through which cultures and societies are being enacted across the region.
Taken in the narrow terms of finance capital, digital transactions leads us to think of the recent interventions of the Indian government in trying to impose a cashless society through demonetization. We might also think of the economic and political transactions through which Asia’s political leaders have become enveloped in the disclosures of the Panama Papers and 1MDB affair.
It is my contention, however, that we need to think of informational exchanges and social communication as being transactions in a much broader sense, for transactions imply certain relations of participation that remediate social relationships. We can think of the practice of e-government as recasting the everyday encounter between citizens and state. When we consider the contours of popular culture and the conduct of interpersonal relationships, we can begin to discern the ways in which digital platforms are enabling, shaping and commodifying new forms of sociability. In this larger sense, the field of digitization in Asia today expresses the force of social change through a vast series of digital transactions.
Research Seminar Series (03/2019)
“Banning Plastic Wastes. Who Cares?”
Speaker: Dr Tiew Kian Ghee
Date: Tuesday, 9 April 2019
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: Seminar Room 6-2-14 (Building 6, Level 2, Room No. 14)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Dr Nicholas Chan (Academic matters)
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Speakers' Profile
Currently, Dr. Tiew Kian Ghee is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at South China University of Technology, China. His research focuses on urban plastic waste management in Guangzhou and Shenzhen cities especially food delivery, which involves massive use of plastic packaging. In 2016, Dr. Kian Ghee received his PhD degree in environmental engineering from the National University of Malaysia, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), funded by a scholarship awarded by the Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia. In 2016-2018, Dr. Kian Ghee worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment at UKM. His research focused on sustainable campuses, especially the development of a comprehensive and cost-effective system of solid waste management on campus. He contributed towards the development of a solid waste recycling management model for Malaysia based on community recycling behaviours and waste composition studies. Dr. Kian Ghee is also involved in the areas of integrated solid waste management and environmental sustainability development for more than 10 years, where his research cut across multiple disciplines, including water resource management, climate change, disaster waste management, and community recycling behaviors. His research requires him to engage with international and national stakeholders and communities. In 2011, he won the first prize of UNESCO’s E-Learning Program <Asia Sustainable Energy> Essay Competition jointly organized by UNESCO Jakarta and Sustainable Energy and Environment (SEE) Forum. With over 30 academic articles published and 15 public talks on related topics, Dr. Kian Ghee is proven to be well-trained on a wide area of topics, including urban climate change, sustainability and world heritage protection.
Abstract
The market demand for plastics is tremendous across the world. The durability and multi-functionality of plastics are two main reasons plastics are widely used in various industries, such as packaging, electrical and electronics, household, automotive, construction, agriculture etc. Suffice it to say, plastics are everywhere. In 2018, imported recycling plastic wastes became a hot issue in Malaysian. It is increasingly clear that plastic wastes from western countries meant for recycling have diverted to Malaysia as the result of an import ban by the Chinese government. The excess of imported plastics for recycling in the country had caused pollution to the environment due to a lack of proper storage of these plastic wastes. In order to resolve this issue, the Malaysian government had tightened the import of plastic wastes in response to a series of serious environmental pollution recently uncovered in the Kuala Langat area. The banning of single-use plastic wastes could be a good start. However, on its own, the ban is grossly inadequate and therefore, it is not a long-term solution. Some researchers suggested several solutions in addressing this problem, such as, increasing tax incentives and rewards policies, implementing buy-back schemes, improving the recycling infrastructure and innovation of reusable plastic products. Unfortunately, Malaysia still lacks a comprehensive policy that regulates the plastic waste recycling industry. Therefore, this talk will share current solid waste management practices in Malaysia, the fundamental information about plastics wastes, and the outcome of a survey on Malaysian recycling behaviours. In addition, this talk will discuss whether the banning of plastic wastes is a sustainable and long-term solution.
Research Seminar Series (02/2019)
“Marriage in Motion: Stories from Penang across Multiple Generations"
Speaker: Professor Janet Carsten
Date: Tuesday, 19 March 2019
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: Meeting Room 2-6-41 (Building 2, Level 6, Room 41)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Associate Professor Yeoh Seng Guan (Academic matters)
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Speakers' Profile
Janet Carsten is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her published work has focussed on kinship, domestic relations, gender, historical migration, the house, adoption reunions, childhood, and memory. Her most recent completed project has been on ideas about bodily substance, and the interface between popular and medical ideas about blood in Malaysia and Britain. She is currently PI on a new comparative project, ‘A Global Anthropology of Transforming Marriage (AGATM), funded by an ERC Advanced Grant. Janet Carsten is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Abstract
What does it mean to marry, to become or to be married, or to stay married – or not - over many years? How do women and men reflect on these different states and experiences? How are marriages located in a particular place and at a particular historical moment? How do they reflect continuity or rupture between generations, and connections and disjunctions between the personal, familial, and the wider social and political setting? This talk aims to reflect on these questions, and others, through an overview of a currently ongoing research project on changing middle class marriage in Penang.
Research Seminar Series (01/2019)
“Enjoy watching scum die”: Online observations on desires for violent retribution through the Malaysian death penalty"
Speaker: Dr Benjamin Loh
Date: Tuesday, 19 February 2019
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: Meeting Room 2-6-41 (Building 2, Level 6, Room 41)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Dr Susan Leong (Academic matters)
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Speakers' Profile
Benjamin Loh is a media scholar and the current senior research fellow at the DAP parliamentary research office. He has had a varied background with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from the University of Malaya, both a Media Studies and Southeast Asian Studies Master’s from Ohio University, and has received his PhD in Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. This diverse academic history allows Benjamin to explore the confluence between media and technology and how they influence society and cultures at large. Through his published articles and earlier academic work, he has explored issues such as recreating physical spaces in online video games and using media to understand class and social structures. His PhD research looks at how pirated media affects how regular people make sense of their media and how it affects their use of it. By understanding how Malaysians make sense of their use of media, Benjamin believes that will reveal better insights into contemporary society that will eventually bridge the digital divide of privilege. His current work focuses on the state of the media in New Malaysia and emphasizes media reforms.
Abstract
In October 2018, the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department for Law, Datuk VK Liew, announced that Malaysia would be abolishing the death penalty. The reception from the public has proven to be divisive with the majority of Malaysians indicating their disapproval over this move using various justifications of the merits of the death penalty. Justifications such as deterrent to crime, serving justice to aggrieved victims and their families, or just a plain desire to see criminals suffer for committing heinous crimes were commonly used. For the latter reason, Malaysians from all walks of life appear to support and expect criminals to be heavily punished for their crimes. In a discourse analysis of reactions posted online (through social media and online forums), a pattern emerges where people delight in schadenfreude at the suffering of people who are accused of crimes, often with little to no boundaries. Comments justifying the death penalty reflected a deeper need to satisfy a desire to see retribution for crimes committed. These comments were collected from online articles and forums that discussed the death penalty abolishment and other high profile cases at the time. This presentation will highlight some of these comments made in local online spaces and attempt to understand and rationalize why online netizens have developed this bloodthirst. Extreme opinions expressed through online media is cathartic and appears to be necessary and highlights why the terminal punishment is necessary to match their internal need for retributive justice.
Research Seminar Series 2018
Research Seminar Series (07/2018)
“Whatsapp, ‘Dark social activism’ and fake news: A view of youth participation before and after Malaysia’s GE14 Election"
Speaker: Dr Amelia Johns, Alfred Deakin Institute
Date: Thursday, 1st November 2018
Time: 10.00am
Venue: Seminar Room 6-2-15 (Building 6, Level 2, Room No. 15)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Assoc. Prof Emma Baulch (Academic matters)
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Speaker’s Profile
Amelia Johns is a Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute. Her work spans the fields of youth studies, digital media studies and migration studies, with a focus on youth citizenship and young people’s negotiation of racism and citizenship in digitally networked publics. Her current research project examines Malaysian-Chinese youth digital practices, and the role the digital plays in negotiations of political participation, citizenship and belonging. She is the author of Battle for the Flag (2015), an empirical investigation of youth performances of racism, nationalism and whiteness in the Cronulla riots of 2005. She is also co-editor of recently published book Negotiating Digital Citizenship: Control, Contest, Culture' (with Anthony McCosker and Son Vivienne, 2016)
Abstract:
On May 9 th 2018, Barisan Nasional (BN) the longest serving government in any democratic country in the world to that date, was swept from power in Malaysia’s GE14 election. In the lead up, media and political scholars claimed that, as opposed to GE13 where social media participation was understood to have influenced the election outcome, GE14 would be the ‘WhatsApp election’. The explanation provided was that WhatsApp was the main media used in the circulation of ‘fake news’, and, that in a context of increased government surveillance and censure of political chat on social media, that encrypted chat apps enabled a ‘safe space’ for citizens to connect with one another and engage in politics (Leong 2018). This paper will examine these claims in light of findings from a 3 year project involving interviews and ethnographic observation of 30 Malaysian-Chinese youths’ (aged 18-24) and their digital citizenship practices, as well as interviews with key policymakers shaping Malaysian digital citizenship policy. A key finding was that the state’s use of the Sedition Act and the Communications and Multimedia Act to take legal action against citizens engaging in political dissent on social media had produced ‘chilling effects’. This led to changes in the styles and repertoires of civic and political action adopted by young people in the study. In particular this was registered in a shift away from publicly visible social media (Twitter, content posted to Facebook walls) and the adoption of WhatsApp and Telegram to engage in politics. The paper will use these findings to challenge and extend dominant theories linking young people’s digital media use to practices of citizenship and democracy, insofar as these centre social media use and underestimate the role of ‘dark social’ communication.
Research Seminar Series (06/2018)
“Academic Expatriates in Malaysia: Motivations, Representations, and Subjectivities"
Speaker: Dr Koh Sin Yee, Monash University Malaysia
Date: Tuesday, 16 October 2018
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: Meeting Room, 2-6-41 (Building 2, Level 6, Room No: 41)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Assoc. Prof Andrew Ng Hock Soon (Academic matters)
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Speaker: Dr Sin I Lin, Independent Scholar / Visitor, University of Edinburgh
Date: Tuesday, 16 October 2018
Time: 12.00pm
Venue: Meeting Room, 2-6-41 (Building 2, Level 6, Room No: 41)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Assoc. Prof Andrew Ng Hock Soon (Academic matters).
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Speaker's Profile
Koh Sin Yee is Senior Lecturer at the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University Malaysia. She is a human geographer working at the intersections of migration studies, urban studies, and postcolonial geography. Her work is motivated by the desire to understand the causes, processes, and consequences of structural and urban inequalities (especially in Southeast Asian and East Asian contexts), and how people cope individually and collectively under such conditions – with a particular focus on mobilities.
Sin I Lin is an independent scholar based in Glasgow and visitor at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Social and Political Sciences where she completed her PhD in Sociology. Her work centres on issues of inequality, disadvantage and exclusion as they relate to the areas of social mobility, higher education and international migration. She has published on topics such as middle-class practices of distinction, the education-migration nexus, the value of international education and educational reforms with a Malaysian and transnational focus.
Abstract:
State-led knowledge economy policies and the transnational delivery of international education have facilitated growing numbers of academic expatriates (e.g. foreign higher education staff and international school teachers) in Asia. Extant, but limited, literature – shaped in part by state and marketing discourses – predominantly suggests that a boundaryless career is readily available to these expatriates. However, despite their assumed privilege, academic expatriates often occupy multiple positions of (dis)advantage within hierarchies of power and differentiation. This opens up, but also limits, their ability to acquire and transfer capital (economic, social, cultural, symbolic) to facilitate their mobility (e.g. geographical, economic, professional, temporal and imaginary).
This paper joins an emerging body of work which explores the complexities of mobility among academic expatriates in/through Asia. Focusing on academic expatriates in Malaysia, we discuss our ongoing scoping project which evaluates the extent, value and feasibility of researching their mobility. We present initial findings from our literature review, outlining academic expatriates’ motivations, representations and subjectivities as experienced by them and portrayed in the education, government, media and real estate sectors. We lay out our developing qualitative interview design as we interview academic expatriates, policy-makers and agencies in Kuala Lumpur, Selangor and Johor (Iskandar region) over the coming months. We propose directions forward and collaborative opportunities to address gaps between policy/rhetoric and the differentiated lived experiences of academic expatriates. The project has important implications for theory, practice and policies surrounding highly skilled migration and academic talent management in and beyond Malaysia.
Research Seminar Series (05/2018)
“Singapore as a Media City and Smart Nation: Real and Fictional Myths"
Speaker: Associate Professor Terence Lee
Date: Tuesday, 18 September 2018
Time: 7.00pm
Venue: Seminar Room 6-2-14 (Building 6, Level 2, Room 14)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Dr Susan Leong (Academic matters)
Note: Registration starts at 6pm with light refreshments.
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Speaker’s Profile
Terence Lee is Associate Professor in Communication and Media Studies at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. He is also Research Fellow of its well-known Asia Research Centre. Terence is Series Co-editor (with Susan Leong) of Rowman and Littlefield International’s ‘Media, Culture and Communication in Asia-Pacific Societies’ growing book series; and sits on the editorial boards of a number of international journals, including: Media International Australia (Sage), Continuum (Routledge), and Communication Research and Practice (Routledge). A former President of ANZCA (2014-15), Terence is the author or editor of the following books: Political Regimes and the Media in Asia (with Krishna Sen, 2008, Routledge), The Media, Cultural Control and Government in Singapore (2010, Routledge), Voting in Change: Politics of Singapore’s 2011 General Election (with Kevin YL Tan, 2011, Ethos Books), Change in Voting: Singapore’s 2015 General Election (with Kevin YL Tan, 2016, Ethos Books), and Singapore: Negotiating State and Society, 1965-2015 (with Jason Lim, 2016, Routledge).
Abstract:
Singapore has long presented itself as a global media hub, which in common parlance speaks of the city-state as a thriving centre of media production/consumption. More recently, Singapore has promoted itself as a creative (and innovation) hub, with narratives of a digitally-connected smart nation the latest to capture public imagination. But are these real or fictional?
The paper makes the point that most of the narratives that accompany these declarations are rarely critiqued nor unpacked, in part because they are not well understood. Nor do not show up much in reality. This paper argues that they are best understood as myths in the Barthesian sense in that they are ideological positions purposefully naturalised into Singapore society to serve a broader economic and political function.
My presentation seeks to undertake a chronological review of Singapore’s ‘media city’ or ‘media hub’ plans and policies from the 1970s. It considers how it has since been subsumed under the discourses of creativity and innovation, as well as in the current ‘smart nation’ imperative, thereby extending the myth into the future.
Research Seminar Series (04/2018)
Speaker: Assistant Professor Mohan Ambikaipaker
Date: Tuesday, 15 May 2018
Time: 12.00pm - 1.00pm
Venue: Meeting Room, 2-6-41 (Building 2, Level 6, Room No: 41)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Assoc. Prof Yeoh Seng Guan (Academic matters)
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Speaker’s Profile
Mohan Ambikaipaker is an Assistant Professor of Critical Race Theory and Postcolonial Studies at the Department of Communication, Tulane University, USA. He is the author of the forthcoming ethnographically researched book, Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). He has also published in leading journals such as Postcolonial Studies, Communication, Culture and Critique, Journal of Intercultural Studies and Ethnic and Racial Studies.
Abstract:
In 1955, upon hearing from a newspaper report of the upcoming conference of recently liberated Asian and African nations in Bandung, Indonesia, the internationally renown African American writer Richard Wright became determined to attend and write about the significance of this historic event.
The account of his explorations and encounters was published in 1956 as The Colour Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Today, Bandung has become an idiom for the desires of African-Asian and Global South solidarity sometimes referred to as the ‘Bandung spirit’ and this political and cultural spirit also influenced Malaysian writers such as Usman Awang and many others. And yet alongside this stated ideal, there are many contradictions between people of African and Asian descent, both at the level of state-to-state relations as well as in everyday social dynamics. As the forces of globalization and the neo-liberalisation of Global South economies have taken place since the 1990s, there has also been a greater movement of people across borders, and hence African-Asian encounters and daily social relations have grown from the abstract to the concrete. However, the cultural discourse that has emerged in Malaysia concerning the presence of African students and immigrants has been steeped in antiblack racism and violence. These deeply absorbed and redeployed antiblack discourses help to situate Malaysia and Malaysians as complicit in reproducing globalized hierarchies based on the tacit acceptance of the deep structures of racist thinking and social organization that go beyond the confines of the Malay-Chinese-Indian focus of national racial politics.
Research Seminar Series (03/2018)
"Living Out Sexuality and Faith: Body Admissions of Malaysian Gay and Bisexual Men"
Speaker: Dr Joseph N.Goh
Date: Tuesday, 17 April 2018
Time: 12.00pm - 1.00pm
Venue: Seminar Room 6-2-15 (Building 6, Level 2, Room No 15)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Assoc. Prof Andrew Ng Hock Soon (Academic matters)
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Speaker’s Profile
Joseph N. Goh is a Lecturer in Gender Studies at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. He holds a PhD in gender, sexuality and theology, and his research interests include queer and LGBTI studies, human rights and sexual health issues, diverse theological and religious studies, and qualitative research. Goh is the author of Living Out Sexuality and Faith: Body Admissions of Malaysian Gay and Bisexual Men (Routledge, 2018), and co-editor of Queering Migrations Towards, From, and Beyond Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) with Hugo Córdova Quero and Michael Sepidoza Campos.
Abstract:
Queer theologies (Althaus-Reid, 2000; Campos et al., 2014; Shore-Goss, Bohache, Cheng, & West, 2013) move beyond the rigid impasses that are often constructed by mainstream Christianities, in which gender and sexual diversities are held as abnormal and sinful, and incompatible with any valid form of Christian value or thought. In contrast, queer theologies are predicated on the actual everyday realities of queer people as valuable theological resources that can contribute to the varied depositories of Christian tradition. This presentation cum book launch continues queer theological discourses by foregrounding the ways in which a queer analysis of the lives of Malaysian gay and bisexual men can reveal something about personal growth, right human relationships and God. By focusing on several vignettes from the lived experiences of these men, this presentation aims to articulate some facets of a Malaysian queer sexual theology.
Research Seminar Series (02/2018)
"Reframing Asian Muslim Women in the Name of Honor: Neo-Orientalism and Gender Politics in Mukhtar Mai’s Constructed Narratives”
Speaker: Associate Professor Yi-lin Yu
Date: Thursday, 1 February 2018
Time: 11.00am - 12.00pm
Venue: Communication Lab, 9-5-08 (Building 9, Level 5, Room No 08)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Assoc. Prof Sharon A. Bong (Academic matters)
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Speaker’s Profile
Yi-lin Yu, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Ilan University in Taiwan. Her research interests include motherhood in literature, third-wave feminisms, girls’ studies and TEFL. Her works have been published in thirdspace, The Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies and Asian Women. She is the author of Mother, She Wrote: Matrilineal Narratives in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Peter Lang, 2005).
Abstract:
Honor rape has oftentimes been severely criticized as extreme violation of human rights by Western human rights advocates. Although the mainstreaming of human rights discourses since the 1990s is the corollary of an aspiration to a global civil society, it often does so at the expense of pigeonholing the non-Western others into stereotypes. Mukhtar Mai’s memoir, In the Name of Honor, for instance, was later published as a hot commodity in the West after her ordeal of honor rape had been addressed by a New York Times journalist as a barbaric tradition and an act of terrorism. Despite that Mai’s memoir has added a more balanced version to her story, it is, however, encoded in the rhetoric of neo-Orientalism by reframing Asian Muslim women in the name of honor. Through exploring Mai’s constructed narratives, this seminar will investigate the ways in which false gender representation sustains the continuity of neo-Orientalism.
Research Seminar Series (01/2018)
"Rethinking Islam in a Troubled World: Religious Themes in the Novels of Isa Kamari”
Speaker: Professor Harry Aveling
Date: Tuesday, 23 January 2018
Time: 10.30am - 12.00pm
Venue: Meeting Room 2-6-41 (Building 2, Level 6, Room No 41)
Contact person: Ms Eswary Sivalingam (Logistics) and Assoc. Prof Andrew Ng Hock Soon (Academic matters)
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Speaker’s Profile
Professor Harry Aveling holds adjunct appointments in Translation Studies at Monash University, and Asian Studies, La Trobe University, both in Melbourne. He earned the degrees of PhD in Malay Studies from the National University of Singapore and DCA (Doctor of Creative Arts) from the University of Technology, Sydney. In 1991 he received the Anugerah Pengembangan Sastera in recognition of his international promotion of a greater understanding of Malay Literature. He has translated extensively from Indonesian and Malay literature.
Abstract:
Religion is a major topic in the novels of the prolific Singapore author Isa Kamari (born 1960). In his earliest writing (One Earth 2008), Islam is an unproblematic religion that offers clarity of doctrine, guidance in everyday life, comfort and reassurance. It belongs, however, most naturally to small village situations and has begun to fail in larger urban contexts. Under the influence of globalisation and political resentment, a second movement has developed within Islam which places an emphasis on terrorism and violent action (Song of the Wind 2009, Intercession 2010). A third and contrasting perspective focuses on the inner spiritual nature of Islam (Selendang Sukma 2014, The Tower 2010). Isa’s latest work, Tweet (2016), is influenced by Attar’s mystical allegory, The Conference of the Birds (c. 1177), but argues for a spirituality that is committed to the transformation of worldly life in a positive and compassionate direction and not an escape from it.