Hosted by ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute, Khairy Jamaluddin, a Visiting Senior Fellow at ISEAS, will dive into whether Anwar Ibrahim can win over Malay voters, especially in the upcoming six state elections scheduled in two months.

Hosted by the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University, Sandy F. Chang, University of Florida, will discuss the formation of intimacies between Chinese women and Indian or Malay men as politically charged sites of racial knowledge production at the turn of the twentieth century in British Malaya.

Hosted by the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University, Asmus Rungby, Yale University, will outline his ongoing work to account for unarticulated insights and political attitudes among Urban Borneans.

Hosted by SEACoast, Dr. Benny Baskara, visiting Research Associate at UCSC Anthropology, will lead a discussion on Teren Sevea's book, Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya.

Splendors of Malay World Textiles is an unprecedented exhibition put together by collector John Ang, displaying 650 textiles. This event is sponsored by University of Hawaii and the International Hajji Baba Society of Washington, DC.

Join the UCSC Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions for a discussion on Pontianak, a female vampire/ghost/monster in Malay cultures, and her kins in Southeast Asia. By using select chapters from Rosalind Galt's new book, Alluring Monsters: the Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization, this talk will consider gender relations, aesthetics, ethnic boundaries, urbanization, environmental change, and secularism in Southeast Asia.

In the past ten years, Malaysian society has increasingly witnessed the phenomenon of xin yimin, where citizens of the PRC have become long-term residents in Malaysia. Join Dr. Ngeow Chow-Bing, Institute of China Studies at the University of Malaya, and moderator Professor Leo Suryadinata, ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, for a discussion on the social, political, cultural, and economic implications of this phenomenon.

Hosted by ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute, Datuk Seri Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad, a Member of Parliament for Kuala Selangor, will discuss Malaysia’s recent political, economic and social upheavals including the successes and failures of Malaysia’s Covid-19 response under the Muhyiddin and Ismail Sabri administrations.

In this talk organized by the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, Khoo Boo Teik, Professor Emeritus at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo, will discuss the impact of BERSIH, the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections, on election reform and democratic politics in Malaysia.

In this seminar hosted by the East-West Center, Dan Slater, the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies Director at University of Michigan, and Lynette Ong, an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, will discuss Ong’s latest book The Street and the Ballot Box: Interactions between Social Movements and Electoral Politics in Authoritarian Contexts. NYSEAN member Satu P. Limaye will moderate this talk.

The Ronald and Janette Gatty Lecture Series is a weekly lecture series featuring advanced Cornell Southeast Asia Program graduate students as well as academics, diplomats, researchers, and others who have expertise in Southeast Asia. Hanisah Abdullah Sani presents a talk on religion, law, and state-building in colonial Malaya.

The Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), in partnership with Transparency International Malaysia and the Merdeka Center for Opinion Research, will be hosting a webinar on the transparency and impact of Malaysia’s COVID-19 stimulus relief funds.

Using survey experiments in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Malaysia, which vary along regime types, and the salience of ethnic division, Mai Truong, PhD. Candidate in Political Science at University of Arizona, show that regime types, ethnic division, and the nature of policy-based movements interact to influence public support toward cross-movement coalitions under authoritarian rule.

This webinar will address the disappointment among DAP supporters that it had not made good on its election promises and failed to implement institutional reforms. Other questions addressed include: How will the DAP determine which parties it should work with both before and after the general election? What are the new challenges for the new generation of DAP leaders and how do their views and responses differ from the earlier generation? What are the key priorities of Malaysians post-Covid, and what therefore are DAP’s key policy objectives?

This webinar will trace the changing structural and domestic conditions underpinning ambiguities in Malaysia-United States relations, before presenting a preliminary assessment on the prospects and problems of the Malaysia-United States alignment in the post-pandemic era.

Dr. Sook Ning Chua, founder of Relate Malaysia, a nonprofit mental health organization, will discuss recent research findings, the challenges Relate Malaysia faces, and new directions for community mental health in Malaysia.

This event will address the question of how the January 6th event has been understood within 5 different Southeast Asian countries with variable levels of democracy: Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

Gerald Sim discusses his new book, Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability, with documentary filmmaker Tan Pin Pin. It is an interdisciplinary journey through a refreshing set of unique aesthetics from Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

On May 9, 2018, the Barisan Nasional (BN) government lost Malaysia’s 14th general election (GE14) and was replaced by the Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition. The election also saw significant changes at the state level, with PH now controlling seven states compared to its previous two, and BN controlling two compared to its previous eight. Aside from Kelantan, PAS regained Terengganu. The Sabah state government, held by Parti Warisan Sabah (Warisan) was aligned with PH, while the Sarawak state government was aligned with BN. This webinar featuring Tricia Yeoh (CEO of the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (IDEAS), Visiting Fellow at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, and PhD Candidate at the University of Nottingham Malaysia) will discuss federal-state relations during the Pakatan Harapan government’s administration from 2018 to 2020.

(Image: Vnonymous/Wikimedia Commons)

Malaysian youth have reached an advanced stage of manga consumption and begun creating original works. In this webinar, Dr. Rachel Chan Suet Kay (Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnic Studies, National University of Malaysia) will observe the emergence of a new wave of Malaysian-made manga that roots itself in locally recognizable depictions of standard ethnicity, gender, and social class dimensions, focusing her analysis on the specific manga publication “Kepahitan Tersembunyi” by Leoz, published under Gempak Starz. She argues that this particular manga novel reaches into a recognizable Malaysian landscape and highlights the way stylistic elements of manga are used to signify identifications of ethnicity, gender, and social class in a way that is recognizable to the Malaysian reader. This suggests that manga may be seen as a platform for the dramaturgy of “everyday-defined” realities (Shamsul Amri Baharuddin, 1996).

Iskandar Malaysia (IM) is a 4,749 square-kilometer urban conurbation and development region located at the Malaysia-Singapore border. State-led development of this regional economic corridor has attracted inflows of foreign investments and spurred the rise of mid- to high-end urban developments by foreign developers. This has resulted in the emergence of a (trans)urban migration industry consisting of intermediary entities that are co-developing and co-marketing ‘migration products’ (real estate, education, and lifestyle migration) as an integrated package to middle-class and affluent migrants from the region. In this talk, speaker Sin Yee Koh will put forth the argument that the industry’s entrepreneurial pursuits are complicit in transforming the urban into spaces of transnational consumption; and that, together with state actors, the industry co-shapes the transnational and micro-urban geographies in/through IM. An urban-focused lens can shed light on how the promotion of consumption-led mobility by the migration industry contributes to the production of transnational urbanism in the context of speculative urbanism.

(Image: c/o Transient Spaces & Societies)

While 2020 has not been a banner year for anyone around the globe, it has been a particularly miserable one for Malaysian women. The baby steps towards equality achieved under the Pakatan Harapan government (the first female Deputy Prime Minister, the highest number of women Ministers in the Cabinet) have largely been swept away by the coup that instated the Perikatan Nasional government. While change was slow under the PH government, these moves by PN have been particularly disastrous for women. This webinar will discuss why this is, and what the future holds for women as long as PN remains in power. The speaker, Marina Mahathir, is a writer and women’s rights and HIV/AIDS activist. She previously served as the President of the Malaysian AIDS Council (1993-2005) and the Board of Sisters in Islam (2010-2016).

The Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale’s Brown Bag Seminar Series presents “Constructing an Asian Look: Beauty Ideals and Cosmetic Surgery in Malaysia.“

About the Speaker: Alka Menon is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yale University, where she is also a research fellow at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. Her research examines the effects of globalization and medical consumerism on physician authority and healthcare. Currently, she is working on a book project on cosmetic surgery in transnational perspective, focusing on the multiethnic cases of the U.S. and Malaysia. Her work has received support from the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. Alka received her PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University in 2018.

Asia Society is delighted to host His Excellency Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, for an address and a discussion sharing his insights on how Malaysia will meet the challenges confronting the security, prosperity, and sustainability in Asia. Topics will range from his perspective on the state and future of ASEAN; the Indo-Pacific concept; regional integration, connectivity, and China's Belt and Road Initiative; and regional trade relations. He will be joined in conversation by the Hon. Kevin Rudd, President of the Asia Society Policy Institute.

Image credit: Tasnim News Agency/Wikimedia Commons

In debates on the UN, attention is typically focused on instances where the organization has failed, either because of tensions between the permanent members in the Security Council, or because it has failed to adequately respond to prevent famine, genocide, or other humanitarian disasters. However, the UN is more than its failures and its most prominent body. It is a bureaucracy in which states seek to have agency: where they seek to guide and take ownership of a particular international agenda. Yet, within the academic debates on this aspect of the UN, the issue of agency of middle powers is underdeveloped. 

This presentation seeks to fill that that gap by assessing why states contribute to the effective running of the UN, and why they send peacekeepers or other personnel to make the organization tick.  In contrast to many studies of middle power that focus on Western countries like Australia and Canada, this study analyses the role of Asian middle powers, particularly Indonesia and Malaysia.

The Southeast Asia Seminar is pleased to announce that it will meet on Thursday, April 6, 2017 for a presentation entitled: “Is Malaysia Falling Apart? A Pre-Election Stocktaking.” Our speaker will be Meredith L. Weiss, Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Dr. Weiss has published widely on political mobilization and contention, the politics of identity and development, and electoral politics in Southeast Asia.