The UBC Myanmar Initiative and the Centre for Southeast Asia Research at SPPGA, in collaboration with UBC Anthropology, invite you to join us for a seminar and book talk with Dr. Elliott Prasse-Freeman from National University of Singapore. This is a hybrid event which will be held in-person and online simultaneously.
This seminar is a component of the UBC Myanmar Discussion Series and the 2013 Knowledge Marketplace, which is organized by the Knowledge for Democracy Myanmar (K4DM) initiative. Learn more about the 2013 Knowledge Marketplace here.
About the Talk
For decades, the outside world mostly knew Myanmar as the site of a valiant human rights struggle against an oppressive military regime, predominantly through the figure of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Yet, a closer look at Burmese grassroots sentiments reveals a significant schism between elite human rights cosmopolitans and subaltern Burmese subjects maneuvering under brutal and negligent governance. While elites have endorsed human rights logics, subalterns are ambivalent, often going so far as to refuse rights themselves, seeing in them no more than empty promises. Such alternative perspectives became apparent during Burma’s much-lauded decade-long “transition” from military rule that began in 2011, a period of massive change that saw an explosion of political and social activism. How then do people conduct politics when they lack the legally and symbolically stabilizing force of “rights” to guarantee their incursions against injustice?
In this presentation, Elliott Prasse-Freeman describes his recent book on the topic, in which he documents grassroots political activists who advocate for workers and peasants across Burma, covering not only the so-called “democratic transition” from 2011-2021, but it also the February 2021 military coup that ended that experiment and the ongoing mass uprising against it. Taking the reader from protest camps, to flop houses, to prisons, and presenting practices as varied as courtroom immolation, occult cursing ceremonies, and land reoccupations, the talk shows how Burmese subaltern politics compel us to reconsider how rights frameworks operate everywhere.
About the Speaker
Elliott Prasse-Freeman is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. He received his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Yale University.
