You are all invited to this month’s colloquium. Our special guest speaker in Goh Beng-Lan, currently a fellow at CSEAS.

Date & Time: 27th Jun 2019 14:00~15:00
Place: Middle-sized Meeting Room, Inamori, 3rd Floor

Title: A Quiet Revolution: Cultivating Mindset Change in Urban Malaysia
Speaker: Goh Beng-Lan

This presentation uses ethnographic, online and secondary research conducted over the past decade to explore creative resistance against ethno-religious bigotries in three societal arenas, namely, popular religion, artistic practices and citizenry initiatives. While seemingly disparate, these rejections of ethno-religious dogmas are nonetheless united by a mode of protest that is configured by the intersection of social media and a creative play of symbolism, metaphor, and image. All in all, they stimulate new and open ways of interrogating, expressing, and minimizing ethno-religious differences that strike powerful cords with fellow Malaysians. By analyzing the atypical actors, sites and methodologies of resistance associated with these actions, this presentation considers mindset change as a basis to renew radical politics in contemporary Malaysia

Bio:
Dr. Goh Beng-Lan is currently an independent scholar and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Area Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Indonesia, Jakarta. She is the author of Modern Dreams: An Enquiry into Power, Cultural Difference and the Cityscape in Contemporary Urban Malaysia(2002); the editor of Decentering and Diversifying Southeast Asian Studies: Perspectives from the Region(2011); and co-editor of Asia in Europe, Europe in Asia: Rethinking Academic, Social and Cultural Linkages(2004). Her current research interests revolve around two axes: intellectual interconnectedness in decolonizing knowledge in (Southeast) Asian studies and the human sciences; and the politics of generating intercultural understanding and learning among experimental communities in urban Malaysia.