This year, the Centre for Southeast Asia Research (CSEAR) hosted an array of scholarly and public events that highlighted the distinct national histories and sociopolitical issues of Southeast Asia, while also situating such histories within a broader geopolitical context. Many of these events paid particular attention to the impacts of Euro-American empire-building, decolonization, diaspora, displacement and resistance.
The Centre kicked off the year with an informal discussion about contemporary Philippine politics with Richard Heydarian, one of the country’s best-known public intellectuals and Senior Lecturer at the University of the Philippines’ Asian Center, followed by another Philippines-focused event in the spring. That panel brought together cultural worker and public scholar Allison Masangkay, Dr. Dennis Gupa, Dr. Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril, and Walter Villanueva to discuss how the political-economic management of climate change and migrant care work affects Filipino health and wellbeing across the archipelago and diaspora.
Continuing with the theme of dislocation, a subsequent event featured a keynote by Rohingya student Farhana Roshan on her lived experiences with persecution and forced migration, followed by a panel with Rohingya women activists and Women, Peace and Security scholars — including Yasmin Ullah, Katrina Leclerc, and Isabella Aung — on how Rohingya women navigate violence, statelessness, and humanitarian systems while shaping transnational feminist responses.
Co-sponsored by the UBC Department of History, CSEAR also hosted Dr. Christopher Goscha of the Université du Québec à Montréal for a comparative discussion on why some colonially conceived monarchs survive decolonization, drawing on the cases of Bao Dai, Mohammed V, and Norodom Sihanouk. In March, Dr. Hilmar Farid of the Indonesian Institute of Social History and Georgetown University reflected on how the meaning of Indonesian citizenship and Indonesia’s place in the world has shifted over time.
Shortly after, in partnership with the UBC Department of Geography, the Centre hosted Dr. Miles Kenney-Lazar on his book Socializing Land, exploring how histories of land socialization shape resource control as Laos pursues more sustainable development. CSEAR also co-sponsored a film screening with the Graduate Training in Southeast Asia consortium featuring two short films on art and expression in Malaysia, followed by a Zoom discussion with the filmmakers attended by universities across North America.
To wrap up the year, the Centre hosted Professor Leonora Angeles from the UBC Social Justice Institute on how and why one million Filipinos ended up in Canada, offered as a way to contextualize reflections on the Lapu Lapu Day festival in Vancouver the previous year. The talk drew from her forthcoming book, Decolonial Immigrant Flourishing: Lessons from the Global Filipino Saga in Multicultural Canada, published by Palgrave Macmillan.
