CSEAS Seminar Programme
The Centre of Southeast Asian Studies was established in 1964, soon after the founding of Monash University, in recognition of the importance of the Southeast Asian region to the university and the expertise of Monash staff in this field.
The weekly seminar series has been a vital part of the Centre’s activities across the years, facilitating the exchange of research findings between new and established scholars working on the region.
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Weekly schedule – semester one 2010
- All seminars are held on Thursdays in the Elizabeth Burchill Room, Performing Arts Precinct, Clayton Campus. (Building 68 at E4/E3 on the Clayton Campus map: http://www.monash.edu.au/pubs/maps/3-Claytoncolour.pdf)
- The seminar of March 11 will be held in W1010, Menzies Building.
- Seminars commence at 11.00 am, and conclude at 12.30 pm.
- Please send inquiries to the convenor: Julian.Millie@arts.monash.edu.au
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4 March 2010
Dr Emma Baulch
Australian National University
Writing popular culture: Indonesia’s music press
The paper presents Rolling Stone Indonesia, established in 2005 under licence from the principle, New York-based publication, as a case study of changing and enduring themes in Indonesian middle class cultural politics. It draws together two bodies of literature that have not had much to do with one another. One focuses on Indonesian popular music, and the other on the matter of class in Indonesia.
In the English language academic literature, how Indonesian popular music relates to (something like) class has been a compelling question for a lot of writers. In this literature, a kampungan-gedongan dichotomy is quite often invoked. These are terms that literally refer to the built environment (of the slums-of the buildings) but signify more widely as vulgar-refined. Despite their interest in popular music as a crucible of social hierarchy, none of these writers engage literature on the question of class in Indonesia; the matter of how evolving kampungan-gedongan relations as expressed via popular music may help us understand an Indonesian class consciousness and its historical context is not discussed. At the same time, in the surge of literature to emerge on the subject of the Indonesian middle class beginning in the late-1980s and early 1990s, not much consideration has been given to how popular cultural production relates to class.
A body of scholarship that speaks directly to my paper elucidates much about the way an Indonesian intellectual authority has developed in concert with specific cultures of print journalism, in which print media enjoy an authoritative role in determining truth. But most of the writing about this process of truth bearing has focussed on the politics of news reporting; there has been little interest among popular music scholars in how music journalism serves to set the terms, the truth indeed, of music’s classed dimensions. If we want to understand how class relates to Indonesian popular music, we should pay heed to how authoritative writings class specific genres.
Emma Baulch began studying Indonesian in Year 8 High School, in the year 1980, and has spent ten of the last twenty years living in Indonesia. In the early 1990s, she was involved in human rights activism in Jakarta and Melbourne. In the late1990s, spectacular cultural changes brought about by changes in media ownership and content in Indonesia impressed her greatly. Related phenomena continue to overwhelm her and hold her interest. She has written about some of their facets; music subcultures, advertising and the national popular music industry. Her research to date has been on the islands of Java and Bali. In writing, she explores ideas about locality, history and class, notions of agency and resistance, and processes of mediatisation.
Emma Baulch was a doctoral candidate at the PSI at Monash University, and was awarded the degree in 2004. Since then, she has worked for QUT as a research associate on an ARC Linkage project, and undertaken a two-year post-doc at Leiden University’s Anthropology Department. She now works at the ANU, where she is a post-doctoral fellow on an ARC-funded project administered by the Faculty of Asian Studies, and entitled “Middle Classes, New Media and Indie Networks in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia”.
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11 March 2010
Dr Tony Donaldson
NOTE: This seminar is to be held in Menzies W1010
Quiet artists in silent cities: Contemporary artists in Malaysia
The art scene in Malaysia is conservative. Little is known of it outside of the country. Yet contemporary art is thriving in Malaysia. This seminar focuses on two artists in Malaysia to examine the aesthetics and preoccupations of their art in the context of Southeast Asia. In doing so, the talk will also bring out some unspoken features about the art industry in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore.
The first artist to be discussed is the figurative artist Ahmad Zakii Anwar (1955 - ). As a Sufi, his art explores identity issues and theological questions about the nature of existence, embodying certain universal values that are combined with Islamic references such as Ihsan, a concept of excellence and beauty.
The talk will then turn to focus on two recent works by the installation artist Zulkifli Yusoff (1962 - ). In 2009, as part of his Malaya series, Zulkifli Yusoff produced a multimedia work titled Merdeka 57 and a fibreglass piece titled The Planter’s Wife. Both artworks were inspired by the 1952 film The Planter’s Wife, which Yusoff used to explore issues that arose during the British colonial era relating to the position of three main racial groups in Malaya, their socio-economic situation, and their ideologies and feelings.
Two short films on each artist will be screened.
Tony Donaldson is a former Visiting Research Fellow of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore where he initiated a research project on contemporary art in Asia. He is a former Honorary Research Fellow at the Monash Asia Institute. His research and publications focus on the cultures, religions and art of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Malaysia.
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18 March 2010
Dr Fiona Miller
University of Melbourne
Rethinking Vulnerability: Changing Approaches to Understanding Vulnerable People and Places - the case of the Mekong Delta, Vietnam
This seminar will explore changing approaches to our understanding of vulnerable people and places with reference to historical and contemporary environmental change in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. The seminar will situate earlier research on perceptions and responses to environmental risk in this highly productive and dynamic part of Vietnam with more contemporary developments in Vietnam and the Mekong Basin. Increased attention on the threats associated with climate change and its interaction with other environmental and development processes has raised the importance of considering social vulnerability to such changes. Few studies, however, consider the ways in which historical, cultural and political processes influence how vulnerability and resilience to environmental change is shaped.
Fiona Miller is a Future Generation Fellow in the Department of Resource Management and Geography, the University of Melbourne. Prior to this Fiona was a Research Fellow in the Risk, Livelihoods and Vulnerability Programme of the Stockholm Environment Institute. She has also worked as a lecturer in Human Geography at Macquarie University and with the Australian Mekong Resource Centre, the University of Sydney. Fiona has a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Sydney for her research on the political ecology of risk and society - water relations in the Mekong Delta, Viet Nam. Fiona has considerable experience conducting research on the social dimensions of environmental change in the Asia Pacific region, notably Vietnam, as well as Australia. She specialises in research on social vulnerability, water resources management, political ecology, sustainable livelihoods, resilience and community participation.
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25 March 2010
Professor Richard Tanter, Dr Arabella Imhoff
Nautilus Institute, RMIT
Nuclear power as a solution to Indonesia's energy needs: pros, cons and volcanoes
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1 April 2010
Mr Andy Fuller
University of Tasmania
Topic to be announced
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8 April 2010
NO SEMINAR – MID-SEMESTER BREAK
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15 April 2010
Dr James Gomez
Monash University
Social Media and Opposition Parties: Networking for Singapore’s General Elections
This paper seeks to extend the scope of research on opposition parties’ use of the internet in Singapore by analysing its use of online social media. Ever since 2000, when online social media platforms became publically available, opposition parties in Singapore have been experimenting with this medium which includes Flickr, Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter. Of the different types of social media, Facebook – the largest social networking site – is the most popularly used by the opposition parties, its key figures and its supporters. This paper looks into the opposition’s use of social media and argues that compared to other online platforms, social networking sites such as Facebook allow the volume of opposition supporter base to be visible in a manner that was not possible before. It also allows key party members to establish their own individual support base. As a result, Facebook will be the platform to watch in Singapore’s next general elections scheduled to be held by February 2012.
Dr. James Gomez is presently Lecturer and Head of Public Relations, School of Humanities, Communications and Social Sciences at Monash University, Australia. His recent publications on Singapore include, “Online Opposition in Singapore: Communications Outreach Without Electoral Gain”, (2008) /Journal of Contemporary Asia. Vol.38, No.4/ and “Citizen Journalism: Bridging the Discrepancy in Singapore's General Elections News”, Sudostasien Aktuell -/ Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs/. (6/2006) German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Germany.
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22 April 2010
Dr Susie Protschky
Monash University
Dutch still lifes and colonial visual culture in the Netherlands Indies 1800-1949
Still life paintings are most widely associated with seventeenth century Dutch art and culture. It is less commonly known that still lifes were also a popular visual genre in the Netherlands Indies (colonial Indonesia) until the twentieth century. This paper considers what such images reveal about colonial notions of the relationship between nature, culture and civilisation. Early modern scholars have cogently argued that Dutch flower pieces from the seventeenth century typically reflected georgic discourses on human mastery over nature. However, three centuries later flowers were largely absent from colonial still lifes in the Indies: painters and photographers were more inclined to depict tropical fruits, a preference which reflects the development of modern colonial discourses of an abundant tropics, where nature flourished even in the absence of cultivation. Such notions were commonly employed by Europeans in Southeast Asia to justify the need for colonial intervention in the tropics while minimising the role of Asian labour in enriching European economies.
Susie Protschky is an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of History (SOPHIS) at Monash University. She gained her PhD in History from the University of New South Wales (Sydney) in 2007, and was a Lecturer at the University of Western Australia (Perth) from 2008 to 2010. Her first book, Images of the Tropics: Environment and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia, has recently been accepted for publication by KITLV Press (Leiden). Susie specialises in using visual materials as primary sources, and her work to date has focused on topics in the history of the Netherlands Indies ranging from colonial representations of nature and landscape to customs surrounding food and eating. Her current project investigates the role of the House of Orange-Nassau in Dutch colonial expansion.
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(Presented by the Monash Centre for Malaysian Studies)
29 April 2010
Dr. Gerhard Hoffstaedter
La Trobe University
Islamicity – Islam, space and being in peninsular Malaysia
In this paper I look at the role Islam as a religion and more importantly as a way of life plays in the lives of mainly urban Malays. I am particularly interested in the way Islam is used as a tool to delineate space, both metaphorically and in very real terms. Lefebvre sees space as a triplicite, a threefold experiential phenomenon; namely as perceived space (in the physical environment), as conceived space (the semiotic abstraction that informs how people negotiate space as well as the space of corporations, planners, politics) and finally as lived space (the body lives life in interaction with other bodies). The latter two intersect and also appear to have deep fault lines running through them. I aim to elucidate some of these looking at the establishment and protection of Islamic spaces in the media, state policies, and everyday life through the use of icons, state policies and discourse. As disparate as these may sound, they form a close relationship and play an important role in creating, reshaping and maintaining boundaries between people in Malaysia today as well as creating spaces of certainty for Muslims.
Gerhard Hoffstaedter has a BA in Social Anthropology and Politics and MA in Social Anthropology from the University of Kent at Canterbury and a PhD in Anthropology and Sociology from La Trobe University. Since finishing his PhD on Muslim Malay identity politics he has been a research fellow at the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe University working on refugee identity politics in Southeast Asia and the human security debate and its usefulness for anthropology. He has also lectured on anthropological theory at La Trobe and continues to work on Islam in Southeast Asia.
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6 May 2010
Dr Peter Riddell
Topic to be announced
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13 May 2010
Speaker and Topic to be announced
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20 May 2010
Dr Marshall Clark
Deakin University
Dimensions of Indonesia-Malaysia Relations: Islam and Popular Culture
This seminar will explore to what extent in recent years the concept of Southeast Asia as a region appears to be more of a reality in the sphere of popular culture than in regional politics, due to the unprecedented growth of intra-regional pop culture flows. One trend is the so-called ‘Indonesian invasion’, whereby Malaysia has become flooded with Indonesian music and cinema. Indonesian soap operas, on the other hand, are characterised by the ubiquitous presence of Malaysian actors.
Another regional trend is the emergence of cultural texts with a strongly Islamic content. For centuries Islamic linkages within Southeast Asia have made a powerful contribution to cultural and political identity in the Malay world. More recently, Muslim culture is increasingly becoming part of Indonesian and Malaysian popular culture through film, soap operas, novels and songs. This has political implications. The films by Yasmin Ahmad and Hatta Azad Khan, for instance, reflect on the rise of ketuanan Islam (Islamic supremacy) and ketuanan Melayu (Malay supremacy) ideologies in Malaysia. These ideologies are closely associated with the strict implementation of Islamic law and values in recent times as well as ongoing attempts to transform the concept of ‘the Malay’.
Similarly, in the Indonesian context popular culture, far from being mere entertainment, can at times be at the very heart of Indonesian national politics. The post-authoritarian boom of film kearab-araban (Arab-icised, or Islam-centric, films), for instance, which follows hot on the tails of the campaign to outlaw pornography, can be regarded as an element of the recent assertion of ‘popular front’ Islamism, whereby Muslim groups are increasingly jockeying for greater political leverage. By analyzing these trends, this seminar will delineate the intersection of culture and politics in Southeast Asian regionalism.
Dr. Marshall Clark spent several years studying literature and the art of shadow puppeteering in Yogyakarta, Central Java. His writings on literature, cinema and Indonesian masculinities have appeared in the journal ‘Indonesia’ (2001), in the edited collection ‘Popular Culture in Indonesia’ (2008) and in his forthcoming book, ‘Maskulinitas: Culture, Gender and Politics in Indonesia’ (2010). He recently spent several months as Visiting Research Fellow at the Southeast Asia Forum, The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University, USA, where he was working on a joint research project with Juliet Pietsch, ‘Indonesia-Malaysia Relations: Culture, Politics and Regionalism in Southeast Asia’.
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27 May 2010
Dr Max Lane
Topic to be announced
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3 June 2010
Ms Katie Dyt
Against The Stream: Buddhism, Marxism and Gender in the Narrative of a Vietnamese Nun
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ALL WELCOME
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DOWNLOAD full programme for Semester 1, 2010 in pdf format.
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CSEAS Seminar Organiser
Dr Julian Millie
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University
Email: Julian.Millie@arts.monash.edu.au
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Archives of previous years' series