Happening @ Michigan https://events.umich.edu/list/rss RSS Feed for Happening @ Michigan Events at the University of Michigan. CSEAS Lecture Series. Last Flight to Bangkok: Reflections on 60 Years in Southeast Asia (October 25, 2019 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/65089 65089-16515513@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 25, 2019 12:00pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

In this lecture, Professor Gayl Ness will reflect on his sixty year career in Southeast Asian Studies, which has focused on development, environment-social organization, and human ecology. Specifically, he will discuss how rice production generates large empires with state-like political administration, and how the river systems in Vietnam encouraged strong political centralization in the North and political decentralization in the South. Further, Prof. Ness will detail how Southeast Asian geography relates to the high degree of independence of women throughout the region.

Gayl Ness is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Michigan. His work focuses on how geography or land forms affect social organization. He retired in 1997, but continues to teach a first year seminar on Population, Development, and Environment.

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 18 Sep 2019 15:46:41 -0400 2019-10-25T12:00:00-04:00 2019-10-25T13:00:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Center for Southeast Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion Weiser Hall
CSEAS Lecture Series. ‘Why should I keep loving you when I know that you're not true?’ A Cinema of Hiraeth (November 8, 2019 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/68695 68695-17138818@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 8, 2019 12:00pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

In filmmaker Tan Pin Pin’s fixation with the geographical phenomenology of Singapore, one discerns ideas about local relations to space. Tan’s essayistic reflections on landscape are captivated by the unseen effects of rapid urban development, radical transformations necessitated by growth. Sifting through the affective and psychic experiences of accelerated change by way of a postcolonial economic miracle, she tries to find identity through evocative onscreen encounters with visual media, local soundscapes, architecture, and cartography. The films tend to refuse the more common artistic recourse to nostalgia, and defy a critical tendency to circumscribe the island’s national cinema in direct relation to social and political specificity in a traditional sense. Her most recent work casts aside the pretense of national essentialism, to dwell instead on the timeless qualities of non-places. Within these anonymous and alienating “any-space-whatevers,” we come upon the most lucid understanding of what it means to be from somewhere that perhaps, ironically, never was.

Gerald Sim is an associate professor of film and media studies at Florida Atlantic University, the author of The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (2014), and Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia. His essay on Malaysian filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad, “Postcolonial Cacophonies,” was recently published in positions: asia critique.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange. Contact: jessmhil@umich.edu

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 22 Oct 2019 12:43:29 -0400 2019-11-08T12:00:00-05:00 2019-11-08T13:00:00-05:00 Weiser Hall Center for Southeast Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion event_SIM
CSEAS Lecture Series. Crafting Theravada Buddhism: Touch and Material in the lives of Thai Buddhists (November 15, 2019 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/67467 67467-16857942@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 15, 2019 12:00pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Forming, touching, and repairing Buddhist objects and architecture are central to the religious lives of Thai Buddhists, be they monks, craftspeople, or laypeople. Thai historical chronicles, local legends, and everyday discourse position the intentional physical contact with Buddhist material (through ritual and everyday labor) as generating spiritual benefit and constructing ethical values. Drawing on historical analysis and ethnographic work, this talk presents a number of cases that show how Thai Buddhists hold hand-based religious touch to be spiritually powerful and socially efficacious.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 19 Sep 2019 14:54:52 -0400 2019-11-15T12:00:00-05:00 2019-11-15T13:00:00-05:00 Weiser Hall Center for Southeast Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion Weiser Hall
CSEAS Lecture Series. The Deep Constitution: Militant Constitutional Identity and the Afterlife of Martial Law in Thailand (January 31, 2020 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/71495 71495-17834207@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, January 31, 2020 12:00pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

In Thailand, since the adoption of the widely-celebrated 1997 Constitution, all elected governments have been overthrown by the Constitutional Court, the military, or both in the name of democracy. By understanding the 1997 Constitution as a fully liberal-democratic constitution breaking with the country’s military past, most of the academic literature overlooked the resilient continuities and interdependence between military and civilian rule that form, under the patronage of the king, the core of Thailand’s constitutional order. Using historical institutional analysis, this paper documents the inner workings of the Thai Deep Constitution, defined as the legal-operational playbook of Thai democracy’s tutelary powers (the “Deep State”) linked to its Constitutional Identity defined as “Democracy with the King as Head of State.”

Beyond the Thai case study, this paper argues that the constitutional model for any tutelary democracy aims to enshrine, in the name of militant democracy, veto powers of the army and the judiciary over electoral politics in the unamendable part of the constitution, conceptualized as the Deep Constitution.

Eugénie Mérieau is currently a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School. Prior to this, she held academic positions at Sciences Po (France), the University of Göttingen (Germany) and Thammasat University (Thailand). Fluent in Thai, she worked for four years at the King Prajadhipok's Institute under the Thai Parliament as a full-time researcher. Her most recent publications on Thailand have appeared in Asian Journal of Comparative Law, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Southeast Asian Affairs, Buddhism, Law and Society, along more popular venues such as The Atlantic or the New York Times. Her first English-language monograph is forthcoming in 2020 with Hart Publishing under the title "Constitutional Bricolage : Thailand's Sacred King versus the Rule of Law".

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If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange. Contact: Jessica Hill Riggs, jessmhil@umich.edu

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 15 Jan 2020 10:40:41 -0500 2020-01-31T12:00:00-05:00 2020-01-31T13:30:00-05:00 Weiser Hall Center for Southeast Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion Weiser Hall
CSEAS Lecture Series. Decomposing a National Language: Pluralism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Language (February 7, 2020 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/71496 71496-17834208@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 7, 2020 12:00pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

By the 1930s, the Vietnamese vernacular language had unquestionably come to be viewed as the national language of Vietnam, and the primary medium of anticolonial intellectuality. Nationalist thought, which fueled the anticolonial movement, quickly settled on a narrative—patterned after French nationalism—enshrining the Vietnamese language as a kind of ancient vessel of Vietnamese identity, a thread that bound contemporary Vietnamese all the back to an imagined pre-Sinitic past. However, a closer look at both the social and linguistic history of Vietnam reveals an intensely alloyed and mosaic formation of the Vietnamese language—one intimately bound up with a form of Chinese that was also native to the region. In this talk we will explore the linguistic origins of the Vietnamese language, and discuss how these origins challenge and complicate modern nationalist conceptualizations of language and culture in Vietnam.

John Phan completed his Ph.D. at Cornell University in East Asian Literature and Linguistics. After graduating at the end of 2012, he spent two years as a JSPS post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Comparative Linguistics at the National Institute for Japanese Language & Linguistics in Tachikawa, Tokyo. Upon returning to the States, Dr. Phan taught for three years at Rutgers University, before accepting a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Vietnamese Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures at Columbia University. He is currently completing his first book focusing on the history of Sino-Vietic linguistic contact, and is cocurrently working on the emergence of vernacular literary practice in medieval Vietnam. In addition to the nature of linguistic contact and broad issues in linguistic change and historical phonology, he is keenly interested in the cultural and intellectual ramifications of multiple languages coexisting in single East Asian societies, of linguistic pluralism in general, and of the transformation of oral languages into written literary mediums in historically diglossic cultures of East and Southeast Asia. His current work focuses largely on the rise of the vernacular Vietnamese script known as Chữ Nôm, and its development alongside a sustained and flourishing tradition of Literary Chinese composition.

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If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange. Contact: Jessica Hill Riggs, jessmhil@umich.edu

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 15 Jan 2020 10:43:57 -0500 2020-02-07T12:00:00-05:00 2020-02-07T13:30:00-05:00 Weiser Hall Center for Southeast Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion Weiser Hall
CSEAS Lecture Series. Becoming Brokers: Explaining Thailand’s Growing Brand in Global Health (February 21, 2020 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/70968 70968-17760241@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 21, 2020 12:00pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

In areas ranging from universal healthcare to HIV prevention and access to medicine to health technology assessment and tobacco control, Thailand’s public health programs have come to be regarded as a model for the industrializing world. How is it that a resource-constrained nation on the global periphery has produced model policies that are critical to public health and human life so consistently amid such political turmoil? What has led these policies to travel abroad? And more generally, how has a small nation in Southeast Asia exercised such outsized influence in international affairs? Drawing on Fulbright-funded research with policymakers in Thailand and Geneva, this project examines the roots of Thailand’s surprising success.

Dr. Joseph Harris is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University and conducts comparative and historical research that lies at the intersection of sociology, public policy, and global health. He is the author of Achieving Access: Professional Movements and the Politics of Health Universalism (Cornell University Press, 2017). Dr. Harris has served as a consultant to the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank, most recently as Specialist on the Political Economy of Healthcare Reform for the Japan-World Bank Project on Universal Coverage. He is a past recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Award and the Henry Luce Scholarship and holds a Master’s in Public Affairs from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He received his doctorate in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and served as Lecturer at the University of Chicago’s School of Public Policy Studies before joining the faculty at BU. In 2017, Dr. Harris received the Gitner Award for Distinguished Teaching and a Fulbright Scholarship for a project that explores the diffusion of Thailand’s model public health policies abroad. He serves as Associate Editor at Social Science and Medicine.

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If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.
Contact: Jessica Hill Riggs, jessmhil@umich.edu

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 06 Jan 2020 16:17:36 -0500 2020-02-21T12:00:00-05:00 2020-02-21T13:30:00-05:00 Weiser Hall Center for Southeast Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion Weiser Hall
[CANCELLED]. CSEAS Lecture Series. Regime Change and Continuity in Malaysia (March 13, 2020 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/70970 70970-17760243@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 13, 2020 12:00pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Lily Rahim, Malaysia Chair of Islam in Southeast Asia and Associate Teaching Professor, Georgetown University

Since its historic May 2018 breakthrough election, Malaysia's Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition government has experienced some erosion of public support. The presentation will analyse PH's weakening popularity within the context of its 'catch-22' policy and political conundrum. Simply put, the promised implementation of substantive policy reform, with respect to 'Malay rights', threaten to weaken PH's tenuous relations with the predominantly conservative majority Malay community - susceptible to the fear and racial displacement rhetoric of opposition politicians. At the same time, PH's reluctance to implement substantive institutional and policy reforms have generated disillusionment within its urban, cosmopolitan and middle-class electoral base - key to its electoral breakthrough in 2018 but increasingly wary of the governing coalition's leadership tensions.

Lily Zubaidah Rahim is Associate Teaching Professor and Malaysia Chair of Islam in Southeast Asia at the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. She was previously a professor of government and international relations at the University of Sydney, specializing in authoritarian governance, democratization, Southeast Asian Politics, political Islam, and ethic politics. Her books include The Singapore Dilemma: The Political and Educational Marginality of the Malay Community (Oxford University Press 1998/2001; translated to Malay by the Malaysian National Institute for Translation), Singapore in the Malay World: Building and Breaching Regional Bridges (Routledge, 2009), Muslim Secular Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), The Politics of Islamism: Diverging Visions and Trajectories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and The Limits of Authoritarian Governance in Singapore’s Developmental State (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Her current comparative politics book project focuses on regime change and policy reform in Malaysia, Indonesia and Tunisia.

Lily has published in international journals such as Democratization, Contemporary Politics, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Comparative and Comparative Politics, Critical Asian Studies and the Australian Journal of International Affairs. Her sole-authored journal article ‘Governing Muslims in Singapore’s Secular Authoritarian State’ was short-listed for the Boyer Prize by the Australian Journal of International Affairs (AJIA). Lily is Vice-President of the Australian Association for Islamic and Muslim Studies (AAIMS) and Co-Convener of the Social Inclusion Network (SIN) at the University of Sydney. She was Convener of the multi-disciplinary ‘Religion, State and Society’ (RSS) Network and President of the Malaysia and Singapore Society of Australia (MASSA).

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If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange. Contact: - Jessica Hill Riggs, jessmhil@umich.edu

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 12 Mar 2020 12:32:07 -0400 2020-03-13T12:00:00-04:00 2020-03-13T13:30:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Center for Southeast Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion Weiser Hall
[CANCELLED]. CSEAS Lecture Series. Islamizing a Sacred Hindu-Javanese Text: The Story of Jimat Kalimasada in Javanese Wayang Puppet Play (April 3, 2020 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/70971 70971-17760244@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 3, 2020 12:00pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Sumarsam, Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music, Wesleyan University

Before the arrival of Islam, Javanese people had lived in Hindu–Javanese hybrid culture. The Islamization of Java has given rise to not only the expansion of different groups of people with diverse syncretistic religion and culture, but also rich variations in the content and context of Java-Islamic cultural performance genres and ideologies. Believing in the performing arts as one of the major venues for the blending of beliefs and practices, my presentation discusses a particular wayang story, Jimat Kalimasada, to show the complex processes of religious and cultural transformation from Hindu-Javanese to Islam-Javanese world of view.

Sumarsam has played Javanese gamelan since childhood. He is also a keen amateur dhalang (puppeteer) of wayang puppet play. He holds a BA degree from Akademi Seni Karawitan Indonesia, MA from Wesleyan, and PhD from Cornell. Currently holding the status of Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music, he has taught at Wesleyan since 1972. His research on the history, theory, and performance practice of gamelan and wayang, and on Indonesia-Western encounter theme has resulted the publication of numerous articles and two books: Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java (1995) and Javanese Gamelan and the West (2013).

Sumarsam's recent research focuses on the intersections between religion and performing arts, examining discourses of transculturalism, the performing arts, and Islam among the Javanese. He is the recipient of a number of fellowship grants and awards, including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies fellowship (2016-17), Indonesian Bintang Satyalencana Cultural Award (2017), the International Gamelan Festival Literacy Award (2018), and Yale Institute of Sacred Music Fellowship (2019-20). He was recently named the 2018 honorary membership of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

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If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange. Contact:- Jessica Hill Riggs, jessmhil@umich.edu

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 12 Mar 2020 12:31:00 -0400 2020-04-03T12:00:00-04:00 2020-04-03T13:30:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Center for Southeast Asian Studies Lecture / Discussion Weiser Hall
CSEAS Lecture Series. Drawing Borders in Blood: DNA Testing, Citizenship, and Statelessness Prevention in Thailand (October 9, 2020 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/76312 76312-19687505@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 9, 2020 12:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Virtual lecture via Zoom Webinar. Please register at:
http://myumi.ch/NxgZN

Despite its authoritarian commitments, the Thai government is regularly lauded by the UN for its statelessness prevention and eradication efforts. Photographs of happy “hill tribe” youth receiving their national ID cards are widely circulated by both the Thai government and human rights advocates, and are often invoked as examples of “best practices” for statelessness prevention. A relatively recent hallmark of this highly celebrated agenda is DNA testing. How is this test performed and adjudicated, and what logics underlie a program that promotes citizenship by blood? More importantly, what are the political and theoretical implications for pursuing these logics in citizenship adjudication? Drawing on extensive ethnographic and survey research, I argue that DNA testing, while “verifying” the citizenship claims of thousands of individuals on case-by-case bases, also produces an increasingly powerful and expansive infrastructure of body/border drawing, maintenance, and surveillance. Moreover, the research indicates that even as state and humanitarian advocates applaud the “objectivity” of DNA tests in adjudication of citizenship claims, the DNA test is carried out in connection with a range of highly contingent, subjective, and uneven practices at individual, local, and bureaucratic levels. Ultimately, the logics that underlie the DNA test are those of ever-expanding, yet ever-incomplete territorialization—a project that seeks complete, but ultimately unattainable, knowledge of, authority over, and reconciliation between individuals to territory.

Amanda Flaim is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University in James Madison College and the Department of Sociology. She studies problems and paradoxes in human rights and development policy in Southeast Asia among indigenous, highlander, and migrant communities in particular. Her research agendas include the politics of borders, statelessness, and citizenship, labor exploitation and human trafficking discourse, and livelihoods transformations associated with dam development and climate change along the Mekong River.

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Livestream / Virtual Fri, 25 Sep 2020 15:17:25 -0400 2020-10-09T12:00:00-04:00 2020-10-09T13:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Center for Southeast Asian Studies Livestream / Virtual Flaim_image
CSEAS Lecture Series. The Indies of the Setting Sun: Asia and the Early Modern Spanish Geopolitical Imagination (October 23, 2020 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/76307 76307-19685534@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 23, 2020 12:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Free event; please register in advance at: http://myumi.ch/3qV0m

Ricardo Padrón will be discussing his new book, *The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West *(Chicago, 2020). Against established historiography that emphasizes the ways in which America was “invented” as a continent separate from Asia relatively early in the history of European contact with the New World, Padrón looks at the ways in which early modern Spaniards imagined the two continents as connected spaces. Crucial to this effort was the concept of the “Indies,” which retained a powerful transpacific dimension throughout the sixteenth century, in Spanish-speaking circles at least, serving to figure East and Southeast Asia as the western frontier of Spain’s New World empire.

Padrón is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia. His earlier monograph, *The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain* (Chicago 2004) established his reputation as a scholar of early modern cartography, broadly conceived, and on the relationship between visual and verbal mapping. His work has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Renaissance Society of America.

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Livestream / Virtual Thu, 15 Oct 2020 13:33:52 -0400 2020-10-23T12:00:00-04:00 2020-10-23T13:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Center for Southeast Asian Studies Livestream / Virtual padron_image