Southeast Asia Center

The Southeast Asia Center promotes and sustains the study of Southeast Asia and encourages understanding of Southeast Asia in the Pacific Northwest and the nation. We pursue this mission by offering language study and courses in various disciplines that focus on Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian languages offered on a regular basis by the University of Washington include Indonesian, Tagalog, Thai, and Vietnamese as well as the self-study of Burmese. The Southeast Asia Center actively organizes Southeast Asia-related programs such as teacher training, outreach activities and an accessible resource library that includes: print materials, microfilm, maps, and instructional media materials. These activities of the Center are assisted by funding from the University of Washington and the U.S. Department of Education.

A US Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center for Southeast Asian Studies in the Pacific Northwest, the Southeast Asia Center is housed in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies where along with seven other area study centers, it fosters cooperative efforts in teacher training and outreach. The Southeast Asia Center's interdisciplinary academic programs include a BA and MA in International Studies with a Southeast Asian Concentration as well as PhD and professional degrees involving area concentrations and research in Southeast Asia.

The Center's forty core and affiliate faculty come from the College of Arts and Sciences as well as various UW professional colleges. The Center's directorship rotates among core UW faculty. The Associate Director is a professional UW staff member who manages the daily operations of the Center along with oversight from the Director and faculty. The Center depends greatly on the contributions of student assistants, part-time staff, and university and community volunteers.

Announcement:

Master of Arts Degree

The Master of Arts program in Southeast Asian Studies offers students a framework within which to carry out the interdisciplinary study of the peoples and nations of insular and mainland Southeast Asia¯Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, The Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor Loro’sae, and Viet Nam. The curriculum combines training in one or more Southeast Asian languages with study of various aspects of modern and classical Southeast Asian civilizations. The University has a distinguished faculty of scholars who provide instruction in diverse areas of Southeast Asian studies, offering a rich variety of courses on these topics.

Students in the Master’s Degree program in Southeast Asian Studies may specialize in language, drama, ethno-musicology, literature, or cinema, or may concentrate in any field of social scientific application including anthropology, history, geography, political science, or sociology. Students must take courses from at least two different departments during their course of study.

The University’s Southeast Asia program offers special strengths in ethnomusicology, film, history, anthropology, archaeology, environmental studies and marine affairs, political science, sociology, cultural studies, science and technology studies, postcolonial theory, and women studies. Filipino, Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese are regularly taught on campus, and other Southeast Asian languages, including Burmese, can be studied by special arrangement.

Southeast Asian Studies graduates have gone on to graduate programs in various academic disciplines, as well as careers in government service, journalism, teaching, research, marine affairs, international trade, and international development.

-Laurie J. Sears
Chair, Southeast Asian Studies 

International Call for Papers

The Center for Southeast Asian Studies, in conjunction with the Walter
Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington,
Seattle (USA), invites academics, advanced graduate students, and
independent scholars to submit paper proposals for the
conference-workshop

"BEYOND BORDERS: ALTERNATIVE VOICES AND HISTORIES OF THE VIETNAMESE
DIASPORA,"

to be held on the Seattle campus of the University of Washington from
Thursday, March 4th, to Sunday, March 7th, 2010.

Organizers and co-coordinators:
Christoph Giebel and Judith Henchy (Univ. of Washington - Seattle)

 Co-coordinators and "keynote speakers in dialog":
Mariam B. Lam (Univ. of California - Riverside) and Jack Yeager
(Louisiana State University). These two scholars of the Vietnamese
diaspora will help frame the conference-workshop with distinct
Francophone and American perspectives.
 

GENERAL CONCEPT: This March 2010 conference-workshop on the Vietnamese
diaspora is the third in a three-part series, constituting a multi-year
research initiative in Viet Nam Studies, "Alternative Voices and
Histories in Viet Nam: Colonial Modernities and Post-colonial
Narratives." The initiative's aims are:
* to bring together scholars from around the world who focus on new
interpretations of Vietnamese history and historiography;
* to provide a forum for recent, disparate work on new sources and
under-researched topics to critically engage with one another;
* and to make the results available to the wider academic community.
Our first and second conference-workshops, "Beyond Teleologies:
alternative voices and histories in colonial Viet Nam" and "Beyond
Dichotomies: alternative voices and histories in post-colonial Viet Nam"
were held in Seattle in March 2007 and May 2008.
 

The trilogy of conference-workshops is based on the understanding that
modern Vietnamese historiography has been unduly dominated by several
particular and at times overlapping discourses reflective of the
prevalent ideological presumptions of the 20th century, such as those
that:
* privilege the perspectives, interests, and actions of a central state
or states;
* impose nationalist and traditionalist notions on Vietnamese history
and culture;
* subsume Vietnamese revolutionary visions and movements solely
under communist teleologies;
* and enforce Cold War rhetorical postures by excluding, externalizing
and de-legitimizing those that do not fit simplistic binaries.
By contrast, the workshops will highlight academic work that complicates,
challenges and counters these paradigms, thereby enriching and expanding
our understanding of the variety of modern Vietnamese historical actors,
factors, and epistemologies, and suggesting the contours of alternative
models.
 

CALL FOR PAPERS: For this workshop on the Vietnamese diaspora, "Beyond
Borders," we are seeking papers that focus on the disparate margins of
Vietnamese identities. Papers should explore the particular and
multiple histories of Vietnamese overseas sojourn, migration and exile in
early modern, colonial, war time, post-1975, and socialist contexts. At
the same time, contributors can help articulate the initiative's interest
in marginal voices in Vietnamese historiography with the disciplinary
concerns of ethnic and global cultural studies. Papers might illuminate,
among many other possible themes:
* colonial politics of exile and punishment throughout the global French
empire;
* inter-colonial and transnational connections in exile, for example, by
Vietnamese soldiers, workers, students, political activists, prisoners,
travelers, or those subjected to colonial display;
* literary representations of diaspora, from colonialism and the anomie
of "foreigners at home" to the contemporary Vietnamese imaginary of
exile and return;
* diasporic community formations, acculturations, as well as ethnic
enclave politics and economics;
* politically diverse exile groups during the war years and their
relations with post-war refugee communities;
* comparative diasporic work, or multi-sited anthropological research
on, for example, overseas Vietnamese student and migrant/contract
labor populations, adoptees, or transnational out-marriages;
* exposure/isolation of particular demographics: e.g.,
Israeli-Vietnamese, Versailles-New Orleans, or non-identifying diasporic
communities from Viet Nam;
* overseas Vietnamese linkages to Viet Nam, remittances, anti-communist
rhetoric, generational concerns, and educational differences.

In general, the organizers welcome papers on the Vietnamese diaspora,
broadly defined in time and space, that engage a wide range of sources
and literatures, in particular new and under-researched ones.

Please submit, preferably electronically,
(1) a paper abstract,
(2) a brief statement how the paper will engage the larger themes and
concerns of the workshop, and
(3) a short C.V.

BY MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2009

to the organizers of the conference series:

Christoph Giebel, Assoc. Prof. of History and International
Studies, giebel@u.washington.edu and
Judith Henchy, Head, Southeast Asia Section, University of Washington
Libraries,
and Lecturer in International Studies, judithh@u.washington.edu
c/o Center for Southeast Asian Studies
University of Washington, box 353650
Seattle, WA 98195-3650, USA

Participants should agree to submit their draft papers no later than
three weeks prior to the workshop, be willing to provide detailed
comments on other select papers, engage in group deliberations during the
entire workshop, and, if feasible, commit to actively participate in
periodic follow-up discussions and commentary for possible
publications. While graduate students will receive a modest travel
subvention from the organizers, all other participants will be expected
to cover their expenses through other institutional funds.