PANELS

 

Across South East Asia, environments are facing mounting pressures from natural resource exploitation, climate change, urbanization and intensified geographical mobility. The aim of this panel is to explore some of the ecological, social and political dimensions of environment, sustainability and natural resource-based livelihoods in South East Asia, insofar as these are being played out against new geopolitical and global economic conditions. We welcome papers which cover any one of these broad areas and/or the inter-linkages between them, and we are open to submissions from any disciplinary perspective.

 

 

Prominent in the economic landscape of Southeast Asia, tourism also impinges on social, cultural and environmental aspects. It is well known that the industry follows a clear life-cycle, with growth often leading to stagnation and then decline or rejuvenation. Less well understood are the factors which influence these stages, in particular rejuvenation. Papers using case studies and providing conceptual frameworks to explore the different stages and their underlying processes will be welcomed, especially those which apply resilience theory to tourism. It is hoped that an outcome of the panel will be insights into achieving resilient models of tourism.

 

 

The Southeast Asian inland region of the Shan States, Sipsong Pan Na (south-west China), Lan Na (north Thailand) and Lan Xang (western Laos) is inhabited by Tai people who have a distinctive culture expressed in secular and religious scripts, literature, architecture, and arts and crafts. The Tai in this region practice a form of Theravada Buddhism distinguished by monastic literary traditions and rituals. This panel focuses on the religious and cultural traditions of the Tai of the Shan States and south-west China that in recent history have been under pressure as a result of extensive cross-border migration, major changes in social structure and loss of traditional monastic sponsorship.

 

 

Proposals for papers which address any aspect of gender and creativity in Southeast Asia are welcome. Topics include gendered styles of creativity in performance, patterns of gendered creativity in the literature, film, television or other media, the gendering of creativity in everyday life. You are encouraged to present examples from particular societies and to situate your cases against the changing dynamics of creative processes which arise from distinctive local patterns of gender relations and identities. Our discussions will be set against the proliferation of academic debates about gender relations and representations in Southeast Asia since the mid-1990s. I intend to develop a publication from these and other papers on the subject.

 

 

Papers are welcomed on all aspects of the writing traditions of maritime Southeast Asia.  Of particular interest are contributions on the arts of the book; documents and chancery practice in the courts of the archipelago; and previously undescribed manuscript collections. Papers should be based on new unpublished research, and contributions from doctoral students are especially encouraged.

 

 

This session will take the form of a roundtable discussion.

 

 

This panel presents a space for doctoral students working on any subject relating to Southeast Asia to present their research. It is an opportunity to try out new presentation techniques, to gain experience in presenting papers and also to meet colleagues working across the UK and beyond. All this is in a positive and supportive environment.

 

 

With the end of the Cold War and the re-envisaging of security, with threats now perceived to emanate from a number of non-traditional sources, a space has been created for rethinking the relationship between migration and security. Migration can pose a threat to the people and governments of both the sending and receiving states. It can threaten state security by turning civil conflicts into international conflicts as tensions cross borders and it facilitate the spread of terrorism. Migration can though also pose threats at the human level by causing economic hardship and threatening cultural identities and societal cohesion. In this panel we want to not just examine the types of threats that migration can cause, and to whom they cause them, but also whether thinking about migration in security terms is itself a cause of insecurity.

 

 

Over the past ten years, we have seen significant advances in our knowledge about ways in which the environment and landscape of SE Asia have evolved, and how these changes have been related to human activity.  These advances have drawn on new techniques within a number of disciplines including archaeology, anthropology, genetics, biogeography, palynology, physical geography, ecology, animal bone studies and historical research.

 

We welcome contributions to the panel which present insights which have resulted from these recent advances, and which have led to new ways of envisioning the ways in which humans and their activities have shaped, and been shaped by, the SE Asian environment

 

 

The panel seeks to explore the ways in which the threat and execution of violence is related to non-violent aspects of identity formation in Southeast Asia.  Throughout Southeast Asia the burgeoning growth of sites of non-state authority is well documented.  Guerrilla movements, civil militias, community organisations and NGOs are just some of the many kinds of non-state agents whose authority contests or exceeds that of the state within their domains.  Significantly, the authority of these groups often rests on their potential for violence, not just its enactment. Common to these sites of informal or localised authority are familiar discourses of exclusion and territorial control that are often cited as the hallmark of sovereign relations in modernity.   Ethnic and religious identities frequently define the contours of communal relations maintained by these groups.  Custom and tradition are offered as principles of local governance and a countervailing force to the authority of the state.  Are these alternate sites of authority echoes of the formal authoritative structures in which they are embedded, a consequence of the violent ontology of modernity (Burke 2007)?  Or does the capacity for violence and the ontological dimensions of its threat and execution shape social and political relations and the mobilisation of identities?

 

 

This panel aims to explore the historical and contemporary dimensions of health and health care in Southeast Asia as they are associated with social spaces and places where power and contesting strategies are enacted. The processes analysed include the introduction and consolidation of local versions of biomedicine, the governments’ revitalisation of selected local medical knowledge (proposed as national traditional medicine), and the maintenance or emergence of counter-hegemonic healing practices and ritual practitioners. In all these cases, the quest for and access to health care are processes charged with power relations.

 

Colonial and postcolonial interventions to improve the health of local people, family planning programmes, and modern NGOs’ campaigns can be analysed beyond health policy planning discourses into the political economy of health and health care. Specific places which become expressions of the dominant health systems (hospitals, public health stations, village health centres, private surgeries), alternative medicines and therapies (centres providing acupuncture, massage, herbal preparations and treatments, and temples), or contesting rituals (for example spirit mediums’ houses) are constructed to be the spaces in which complex interpersonal dynamics, hierarchies and social strategies are performed.