The 33rd Southeast Asia Seminar on
“Region” and Regional Perspectives on/from Southeast
Asia
Date：The week of September 7 to 11, 2009
Venue：Inamori Foundation Memorial Hall,
Center
for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University
Details of this Year's Seminar and Application
The seminar is free of charge and open to the public. Lectures will be
conducted in English.
The Southeast Asia Seminar, which has been held each summer since 1976,
offers five days of intensive lectures that provide a survey of the nature,
culture, society, economy, and other aspects of the region and the basic
knowledge needed to understand the concept of area studies.
This year’s seminar [for the text in Japanese, click here] focuses on the term “Southeast Asia” itself, which has been understood
in many ways: as theater of military operations, as academic “area studies,”
as maritime and overland trading route and network, as tropical ecosystem
and reservoir of biodiversity, as institutional hub in the on-going process
of regional integration under the rubrics of the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN) and “East Asia Community”, as culture and heritage,
as contact zone and civilizational crossroad, as arena of political activism,
and as a source of intellectual and artistic inspiration for various creative
projects.
The seminar presents a multi-disciplinary overview of historical and contemporary
attempts at conceptualizing, problematizing, and constructing “region”
and “regional perspectives” in and on Southeast Asia. We will explore the
multifarious ways by which scholars, business people, government officials,
states, activists, institutions and organizations, and ordinary people
have engaged in practices of thinking, feeling and making “region”, giving
form and substance to an “area” whose ecology, economies, history, geopolitics,
cultures, and everyday lived experiences are specifiable as units of analysis,
while also capable of generating questions, knowledge, and practices that
can be shared with other regions.
This year’s lineup of speakers and topics include Anthony Reid on Southeast Asia’s distinctiveness as a region; Koji Tanaka on ecology; Kaoru Sugihara on intra-Asian trade; Liu Hong on political economy; Nissim Otmazgin on popular culture;Takeshi Onimaru on the Comintern network; Caroline S. Hau on Asianism and nationalism; Takashi Shiraishi on the ASEAN and East Asia Community; Ken Miichi on Islamic activism; Yoko Hayami on gender and family; . Masaaki Okamoto on political democratization; Noboru Ishikawa on spatial ecology; Patricio Abinales on non-traditional security; Tatsuya Tanami on intellectual exchanges and collaboration; and Takaaki Oiwa on official development assistance and policy.
We are happy to announce that this year’s seminar will be partly sponsored
by the JSPS Asian Core Program, so that in addition to participants based
in Japan, we will have young scholars participating from counterpart institutions
such as Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand. We hope that this will be the start
of fruitful academic exchange among young scholars in Japan and countries
in East and Southeast Asia.
To apply, please click here.
Deadline for applications: Friday, July 3, 2009
Participants are expected to attend all the lectures during the five-day
seminar. Please make your own arrangements for travel to and accommodations
in Kyoto. Owing to logistical constraints, we may not be able to accommodate
all the applications.
Southeast Asia Seminar in the past
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