Modern Southeast Asia: An Introduction through Politics, Environment and Gender

An online intensive workshop

August 3-4, 2023

This two-day online workshop will introduce participants to modern Southeast Asia through presentations on contemporary politics in the region, environmental and governance challenges, and gender.  The program will feature three lecture presentations and will conclude with a plenary panel discussion including all three speakers.  Prior to the workshop, participants will be provided short readings and bibliographies for each session.

This workshop anticipates a two-week Summer 2024 residential institute that will be hosted as part of the Asian Studies Development Program's multiyear project on Enhancing Chinese and Southeast Asian Studies into the Undergraduate Curriculum. This project, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, seeks to enhance Asian studies offerings at undergraduate-serving colleges and universities, with a focus on minority-serving institutions.

Agenda

Speakers

Ehito Kimura is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His research interests lie at the nexus of political change and Southeast Asian politics. He is author of Provincial Proliferation: Territorial Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia (Routledge 2012) exploring the changing dynamics of territoriality after the fall of authoritarianism and the rise of democracy and decentralization in Indonesia. His most recent project has been exploring transitional justice in Indonesia.

Christina E. Firpo is Professor of Southeast Asian History at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. In 2007, she earned a PhD in Vietnamese history from UCLA, and she is the author of two books in Vietnamese women's history: The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in Indochina, 1890-1980 (University of California Press, 2016) and Black Market Business: Selling Sex in Vietnam, 1920-1945 (University of Hawaii Press, 2020). Her third book, Beauty and the Nation: Gender, Capitalism, and Modernity in Vietnam, 1920-1940 (Columbia University Press) is forthcoming. 

Micah R. Fisher, Ph.D. is a Research Fellow at the East-West Center. He conducts research on the human dimensions of environmental change on landscapes, watersheds, and urbanization in the Asia-Pacific. He is an affiliate graduate faculty in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and is affiliate senior lecturer at the Department of Forestry at Hasanuddin University in Indonesia. He currently serves as co-Editor in Chief for the academic peer reviewed journal Forest and Society, which focuses geographically on Southeast Asia.