Conferences, Study Abroad & Journals

CFP: McGill University's IOWC Graduate Student Conference on Indian Ocean World History, October 20, Quebec, Canada - submissions due June 10

CFP: Thailand, Laos, Cambodia (TLC) Board panel for AAS, March 22 - 25, Washington, D.C. - proposals due June 15 to sdarlington@hampshire.edu

Suggested themes: Changing Buddhist/Muslim relations, religious conversion & diversity, politics of the Mekong (environmental issues), ethnomusicology, popular culture, intellectual property & cultural practices/cultural heritage, exchange (symmetrical and asymmetrical) in mainland Southeast Asia, and ecological plurality Mainland Southeast Asia. 

Reframing the Archive: The Reuse of Film and Photographic Images in Postcolonial Southeast Asia Conference, June 22 - 23, United Kingdom

CFP: Environmental Issues and Human Health in Southeast Asia - Rising Voices in Southeast Asian Studies for an AAS panel, March 22 - 25, Washington, D.C. - applications due July 1

Call for Papers: “Southeast Asian Natures: Defining Environmentalism and the Anthropocene in Southeast Asia”

Sponsors: UC Riverside Center for Ideas and Society & Southeast Asia Program

Organizers: David Biggs, Christina Schwenkel and Hendrik Maier

Location: Palm Springs CA

Date: March 12 – 14, 2018

Over one hundred fifty years ago, naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace journeyed through the islands of Southeast Asia, drawing from the region’s rich biodiversity to co-discover with Darwin the theory of natural selection. However, even at that time he noted that forests were quickly giving way to colonial clear cuts and species from one island were showing up in the markets of others. The Anthropocene, an era in which human activity has become a dominant shaping force in ecosystems, global climate and species histories, was already underway. Wallace’s environmentalism was also deeply contingent upon imperial networks of travel and communication; the ensuing wars of empire and decolonization left many eco-cultures in tatters. A critical challenge then for policymakers, intellectuals, scientists and others in the region is to articulate new notions of environmentalism that respond to these complex intersections of ecology, history, and culture. As people and governments struggle to articulate locally meaningful responses to Anthropocene problems, scholars, artists and activists can play important roles in identifying ideas of nature, ruin, sustainability and health that resonate locally or inter-regionally. As literary critic Raymond Williams once noted, the word “nature” is one of the most complex in the English vocabulary. If this is so, then how do these ideas fare in translation?

“Southeast Asian Natures” asks participants to consider the complexities of nature and its changes in the many different languages and ecologies of Southeast Asia. Proposed themes of the workshop are purposefully broad, and they include:

- histories, ecologies and flows

- spatial practices, representations and bio-politics

- nature, sustainability and health in language, ritual and performance

Call for Works-in-Progress

Interested participants are invited to email a ~300-word abstract and 2-page cv by July 1 2017 to dbiggs@ucr.edu with subject “SE ASIAN NATURES.” The abstract should outline a project (textual, visual, digital) that engages with the theme of environmentalism and the Anthropocene in Southeast Asia. A 3000 to 4000-word draft essay will be due February 1, 2018 and pre-circulated among the workshop’s participants.

CFP: Buddhist Studies Graduate Student Conference at Florida State University, November 3 - November 5, Florida - abstracts due August 15

Funding & Fellowships

Endeavor Scholarships & Fellowships for Australia (U.S. and Southeast Asian citizens may apply) - applications due June 30

2018 - 2019 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program Competition - application deadline August 1 

Jobs

 Lecturer position at Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of  Michigan starting September 1 - job closes June 19

I am working with Professor John Gerring at the University of Texas - Austin in this dataset of political leaders and we are currently hiring RAs. We are specially interested in Global South experts.

Do you know if it would be possible to share this email with the grad students or whoever else you think may be interested?

The Global Leadership Project at the University of Texas is looking to recruit country specialists to collect biographical information on political leaders around the world and update this data in our website. Foreign language readers are strongly encouraged to apply.

The Global Leadership Project (GLP) is the first dataset to offer biographical information on leaders throughout the world including members of the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, and other elites whose power is of an informal nature. At present, the GLP encompasses 145 sovereign and semisovereign nation-states and 38,085 leaders, each of whom is coded along 31 parameters, producing approximately 1.1 million data points in a cross-sectional format centered on 2010-13. With this data, one can compare the characteristics of leaders within countries, across countries, and across regions. The GLP promises to serve as a fundamental resource for researchers, policymakers, and citizens, and several research papers are currently under review or in progress.

We are about the launch the second wave of data collection with a grant from the World Bank and we are looking for individuals to take a strong role in such tasks as:

(a)  Look for biographical information of political leaders of your country of expertise such as leaders of the judiciary, executive, and members of the parliament. This data is usually available online. In countries where the data is not easily available in online sources, the coder is expected to make research in other sources (i.e. newspapers, parliamentary archives, etc..) where the data might be available. 

(b) Update the data found in our website

The work will be done remotely. So, there is no need to be in the US or in Austin to work with us. Some stipend will be paid per country coded, i.e. around $450. However, the “payoff” from this project would be primarily in the form of name recognition in your website under the data one collected and CV improvement purposes. We will fully attribute credit to the country experts for the country on which they work.

In bottom of this email you can find the list of countries that we are currently looking for country specialists.

If you are interested please let us know by sending a copy of your CV, along with your country(ies) of interest to pedrombarros@alumni.lse.ac.uk

Sincerely,

Pedro M. Barros, M.Sc. (& Erzen Oncel, PhD)