The Centre for Southeast Asia Research at SPPGA and the UBC Myanmar Initiative invite you to join us for a talk by the internationally acclaimed journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Wa Lone.
Myanmar (Burma) continues to experience rampant violence. Seven years since the Rohingya genocide came to light and three years since the shootings of civilian protestors, amid armed conflicts ongoing since 1948, global attention on Myanmar’s crises has fluctuated heavily over the years. Still, independent reporting on Myanmar remains resilient even after brutal crackdowns on journalists and media. Reflecting on current events, UBC’s Centre for Southeast Asia Research and Myanmar Initiative invite Wa Lone, a multiple-award-winning journalist from Myanmar, to discuss the country’s politics and humanitarian emergencies as well as its future on the global radar. The talk aims to raise inter-disciplinary discourse, highlighting the complex yet crucial role of independent reporting and press freedom in places like Myanmar where mass atrocities are not only widespread, but are also routinely susceptible to international negligence.
About the speaker:
Wa Lone is a Reuters journalist and a graduate student at the University of Toronto. His investigative work on military-led operations in 2017 at the height of the Rohingya genocide earned him and his co-reporter various awards. These include the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize, among several others. In 2018, Wa Lone was included in Time Magazine’s Persons of the Year list as a “guardian” in a “war on truth”.
