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  • This episode features a conversation about development, state-owned enterprises, and the political economy of resource extractivism, with a special focus on the case of Brazil. Jewellord “Jojo” Nem Singh is an Assistant Professor in International Development at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, part of Erasmus University Rotterdam. In 2020, Jojo was awarded a grant from the European Research Council for the five-year project Green Industrial Policy in the Age of Rare Metals: A Trans-regional Comparison of Growth Strategies in Rare Earths Mining (GRIP-ARM), for which he is also affiliated with us here at IIAS. His new book is Business of the State: Why State Ownership Matters for Resource Governance, forthcoming later this year from Oxford University Press. The book includes analysis of multiple sites, including the case of the State-Owned Enterprise (SEO) Petrogras in Brazil. The guest interviewer, Pietro Erber, worked for Eletrobras for many years and was a consultant for the World Bank and for the World Energy Council. He was also the director of the Brazilian Energy Efficiency Institute and writes for newspapers on economics and energy policy. In their conversation, Jojo and Pietro dive deep into the context of Brazil and its relationship to extraction, State-Owned Enterprises (SEOs), as well as corruption and the Lava Jato scandal in Brazil. In covering these topics, they also explore what it all might reveal about growth strategies for states in Global South more broadly, particularly in an era of decarbonization and the race for cleaner technologies.

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  • On this episode of The Channel, we’re bringing you a full episode from our friends over at The Chicken-Neck (TCN) Podcast. TCN is Northeast India's first policy-based podcast offering an informed take on culture, language, food, clothes, history, politics, law, policy, and much more. The particular episode we're re-posting features an interview with Aditya Kiran Kakati, who was formerly a Research Fellow here at the International Institute for Asian Studies. Aditya's primary research project concerns the global history of Indo-Myanmar borderlands during and after World War II. Beyond this, as you'll hear in the interview, Aditya has wide-ranging interests, including a personal as well as academic engagement with food and culinary cultures. In this crossover episode, Aditya discusses the diverse cuisines of Northeast India, as well as the heritages, politics, and taboos that food brings to the fore. If you like this episode, subscribe to The Chicken-Neck (TCN) podcast.

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  • CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains discussion of trauma and sexual violence that some listeners may find difficult.


    On this episode, Kate McGregor joins for a discussion of so-called "comfort women" of Indonesia. McGregor's new book is Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory and Sexual Violence in Indonesia, published in 2023 as part of the Critical Human Rights series at the University of Wisconsin Press. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Japanese military imposed a system of prostitution across East and Southeast Asia. Since the 1990s, survivors of the system, euphemistically called “comfort women,” have sought recognition of and redress for the sexual violence they endured. Systemic Silencing explores this history, its fallout, and ongoing activism of its survivors in the context of Indonesia. Kate McGregor is Professor in Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. She specializes in Indonesian historiography, with particular interests in memories of violence, the Indonesian military, Islam, identity, and historical international links between Indonesia and the world.


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  • This episode features a conversation about political geology with Adam Bobbette, who serves as a Lecturer in Political Geology at the University of Glasgow. After studying architecture and landscape at the University of Toronto, Adam earned his PhD in geography from Cambridge. His research examines the intersections between politics and environmental and earth sciences, with a special regional focus on Indonesia. His new book is The Pulse of the Earth, which was published in 2023 by Duke University Press. As many listeners of this podcast already know, the next meeting of our flagship conference, the International Convention of Asia Scholars, or ICAS 13, will take place in Surabaya, Indonesia from July 28th through August 1st, 2024. In the run-up to that conference, we are hoping to familiarize our network with the local Javanese context to enrich the ICAS experience and deepen our engagement with the city. This episode is part of that project. As you’ll hear, Adam’s work offers a unique and transdisciplinary view onto questions of science, imperialism, Indonesian cosmologies, and contemporary politics, all while introducing listeners to geologic features of the Javanese landscape.

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  • In this episode, Soheb Niazi and Julien Levesque discuss Muslim caste organizations in India. Soheb Niazi is an historian who specializes in the social and economic history of modern India. He is particularly interested in studying the history of non-elite (non-ashrāf) Muslim actors in South Asia to understand the formation of caste and class relations among them. Soheb is currently a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS). During his stay here in Leiden, he is working on his book manuscript, tentatively titled “Contesting Genealogies: Hierarch and Social Mobility among Muslim Occupational Classes in Colonial North India (1870-1940).” Julien Levesque is a political sociologist whose work focuses on socio-political dynamics in South Asian Muslim societies. His first monograph, published in French in 2022 by the Presses universitaires de Rennes, looks into nationalism and identity construction in Pakistan with a focus on the southern Sindh province. Julien currently serves as a Lecturer & Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. His ongoing work examines caste-based political mobilization among Muslims in India. In today’s conversation, Julien and Soheb talk about their recent collaboration as guest editors of a special section in the journal Contemporary South Asia, entitled “Caste Politics, Minority Representation, and Social Mobility: The Associational Life of Muslim Caste in India.” As guest editors, the two curated the collection and also co-authored its substantial introduction. In the following conversation, we discuss the topic of Muslim caste associations generally, and how these organizations reflect and contest political dynamics within the Muslim community, but also beyond into the broader Indian polity.

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  • As listeners may know, this year marked the 10th edition of the ICAS Book Prize (IBP). The prize was established in 2003 by our flagship conference, the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS), to recognize outstanding publications in the field of Asian Studies. The award brings wider visibility to the latest and most impressive books, and it has become one of the most prestigious book prizes in the discipline. Since its inception, the IBP competition has expanded in many ways. It now includes various editions in multiple languages, including French, Chinese, German, Spanish and Portuguese, Japanese, and Korean. Beyond books, the English Language Edition also includes Dissertation Awards in both social sciences and humanities categories to recognize the groundbreaking work of recently minted PhDs. The competition now also includes the “Best Article on Global Hong Kong Studies” award. For all editions and prizes, IIAS depends on partner institutions who organize and/or sponsor the competitions. Along with the many colleagues who serve on our reading committees, they make the IBP what it is, and we are grateful for their work. For more information on these sponsors and the full results of the IBP 2023, visit https://icas.asia/winners-ibp-2023 or check out the special supplement booklet included in the most recent edition of The Newsletter: https://www.iias.asia/the-newsletter/newsletter-96-autumn-2023.


    On today’s episode, we bring you interviews with the two winners of the English Language Edition: Victoria Lee, who won in the Humanities category, followed by John Lie, who won in the Social Sciences category. Victoria Lee is Assistant Professor of the History of Science and Technology at Ohio University. Her winning book is The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan, published in 2021 by the University of Chicago Press. John Lie is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His winning book is Japan, the Sustainable Society: The Artisinal Ethos, Ordinary Virtues, and Everyday Life in the Age of Limits, published in 2021 by the University of California Press.


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  • This bonus episode is guest hosted by Cha-Hsuan Liu, an Affiliated Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies and the editor of the online collection "Global Health Matters" on IIAS' The Blog. To explore the topic of cultural healing and humanistic approaches to health and wellbeing, Cha-Hsuan is joined by four guests: Aditya Kiran Kakati, An-Bang Yu, Marian Markelo, and Fatima Gay Molina. Aditya is a political historian and anthropologist from India. Beyond his scholarship, he is also a practitioner of Pranic Healing, which is a part of the culture in the region where he grew up. Marian Markelo is a well-known Winti priest with a Surinamese background. She was the face of the exhibition "Ritual Specialists" in many Dutch museums. Fatima Gay Molina is a trained anthropologist and currently works for Adventist Disaster and Relief Agency. Her recent research investigates the cultural practices of healing after disasters. Finally, An-Bang Yu was an associate research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. His areas of research include Indigenous psychology and cultural healing, Chinese culture, desire and emotion, the Chinese concept of the person, and the Chinese concept of achievement. In this conversation, Cha-Hsuan and the four guests discuss what is meant by "cultural healing" and how it fits into broader conversations about health, wellbeing, and science.

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  • This episode features a conversation about poetic traditions in East Africa. Earlier this year, Brill published In This Fragile World: Swahili Poetry of Commitment by Ustadh Mahmoud Mau. Ustadh Mau is a spiritual leader and popular poet from Lamu, Kenya. When he visited the Netherlands in May 2023, a local bookshop in Leiden hosted a reading to launch this new collection of English translations. In this episode, we will be playing some recordings from that event to give listeners a sense of the poems in their original Swahili (see also the audio recordings that supplement the book itself). To guide us through the poems and introduce their broader context, the podcast was pleased to welcome Clarissa Vierke and Annachiara Raia, who served as editors and translators of In This Fragile World. Clarissa Vierke is a professor of Literatures in African Languages at the University of Bayreuth. Her PhD examined the specific poetics of a narrative poetic genre from the Swahili Coast in Eastern Africa. Since then, she has worked on manuscript cultures in Eastern Africa and travelling texts along the East African Coast from Kenya to Mozambique and across the Indian Ocean. Annachiara Raia is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). She specializes in African languages and literatures, and her research focuses on the role of texts and performative practices in forging Swahili Islamic networks across Muslim lands of the Indian Ocean and the African continent. 

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  • On October 13, 2023, the International Institute of Asian Studies celebrates its 30th anniversary, and The Newsletter will be releasing a special issue as part of this celebration. More than just a three-decade retrospective, the issue is meant to reflect on the contemporary state of Asian Studies and the role of institutions like IIAS in the discipline's future. As regular readers will know, every edition of The Newsletter includes a special section entitled "The Region," in which partner institutions submit curated collections of short articles meant to highlight ongoing Asian Studies research from different parts of the world. In this episode of the podcast, Paramita Paul (Chief Editor at IIAS) hosts a conversation with representatives of four such partner institutions: (1) ISEAS—Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, represented by its Deputy Chief Executive Officer Terence Chong; (2) New York University - Shanghai, represented by Lena Scheen, Assistant Professor of Global China Studies; (3) Seoul National University Asia Center, represented by Hong Kong Research Professor Ilhong Ko; (4) The Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne, represented by Edwin Jurriëns, Associate Professor in Indonesian Studies, as well as Cathy Harper, editor of the Melbourne Asia Review. In their conversation, the colleagues discuss the nature of their work with The Newsletter, the value of academic collaboration, and the possible future of such work in Asian Studies.

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  • This episode features two colleagues having a discussion about gender in East Asian Religions. The first guest, Jingjing Li, is a University Lecturer in Chinese and Comparative Philosophy at Leiden University. Her primary work examines theories of mind and consciousness across East Asian and Continental traditions, particularly Chinese Wei Shi philosophy and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, respectively. The second guest, Yingruo Show, was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore and now serves as Research Coordinator with the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre (SCCC). She specializes in the intersection of gender and Chinese Buddhist practice. Earlier this summer, Jingjing and Yingruo led an international workshop here in Leiden entitled “Re-staging the Periphery as the Center: Women Communities in East Asian Religions.” The interdisciplinary event was organized by the Leiden University Center for Intercultural Philosophy (LUCIP) with the support of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS). The workshop also received generous funding from the Leiden University Fund and the Dutch Research Council (NWO)’s Veni programme. In the following conversation, Jingjing and Yingruo discuss the event as well as the special issue of the journal Religions that they co-edited earlier in the year. In the course of our discussion, they touch on a variety of topics, including canonical religious texts, lay and monastic practices in East Asia, philosophies of mind, and how all of these are both challenged and invigorated through an interdisciplinary analysis of gender.

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  • This episode features a conversation between Sally Anne Param and Paul Gnanaselvam. Sally, who serves as the guest host, is a sociologist who has conducted research about the Indian community in Malaysia. Paul Gnanaselvam is an Ipoh-born writer and poet whose work often focuses on the experiences, issues, and identity conflicts of those in the Indian diaspora. His latest collection, The Elephant Trophy and Other Stories was published by Penguin Random House SEA in 2021. Sally recently wrote a review of the collection for the IIAS book reviews platform, which led her to contact Paul himself, who graciously agreed to an interview. In addition to his writing, Paul lectures at Universiti Teknologi MARA (Perak Campus) in Malaysia. As you’ll hear, his fiction is deeply concerned with social scientific questions about marginalization, belonging, social hierarchy, exclusion, and identity, all of which are explored in this episode as well.

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  • Hedwig Waters is a cultural and economic anthropologist with research interests in topics of debt, wildlife, and moral economic transitions in Mongolia. She currently works as a Horizon Europe ERA Postdoctoral Fellow at Palacky University in the Czech Republic. Earlier this month, her first book – Moral Economic Transitions in the Mongolian Borderlands: A Proportional Share – was published by University College London Press as part of their series “Economic Exposures in Asia.” Since the 1990s, Mongolia's transition to a market democracy has shifted the economic, political, and cultural landscape of the country. The book examines "Magtaal," a pseudonym for the rural township on the Chinese border in which Waters conducted her fieldwork. Through a careful ethnography, the book links the broader transformation of Mongolia to local borderland lives, especially with respect to debt and wildlife. In this episode of the podcast, Hedwig discusses her ethnographic research, her theoretical intervention within economic anthropology, and the process of shaping such work into her new book.

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  • This episode features a conversation hosted by Aarti Kawlra, the Academic Director of the Humanities Across Borders program here at IIAS, in which she speaks with three guests: Daan van Dartel, Curator of Popular Culture and Fashion at the National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands; Lipika Bansal, a researcher, social designer, and the founder of Textiel Factorij in Amsterdam; and, finally, Kirit Chitara, an artist based in India. In September 2022, IIAS and Humanities Across Borders hosted an In Situ Graduate School entitled Textiles and Dyes as Transnational, Global Knowledge. As Aarti and others collaborated on this event with various textile-related institutions, she met this group and heard the story of Kirit, who had previously found the artwork of his grandfather hanging in the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. This raised all sorts of perennial questions about power in the production and display of art, and in this conversation, the groups discusses such issues of provenance and attribution, of curation and collaboration.

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  • Sanderien Verstappen is Assistant Professor of anthropology at the University of Vienna. In addition to her writing, she is also a filmmaker and the founding director of the Vienna Visual Anthropology Lab. Sanderien’s latest book is New Lives in Anand: Building a Muslim Hub in Western India, published last year by University of Washington Press. In 2002, when widespread anti-Muslim violence broke out across Gujarat, India, the town of Anand was perceived as something of a safe haven. Against this historical backdrop, the book ethnographically explores contemporary Anand. In the decades since 2002, the town became a hub for Muslims at multiple scales – an aspirational destination for rural villagers, a regional center in western India, and a place linked to diasporic sites abroad. In this episode, Sanderien discusses her multifaceted work in Anand, touching on themes of transnationalism, place-making, and multi-sited ethnography.

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  • Today on the podcast, we welcome Jia Zhao and Darunee Terdtoontaveedej, both of whom are on the team that organizes the CinemAsia Film Festival. Jia is the Artistic Director for the festival, and Darunee is a Film Programmer for CinemAsia and helps organize special events, particularly focusing on LGBTQ programming. CinemAsia is one of the largest and longest-running Asian film festivals in Europe. For nearly two decades, CinemAsia has sought to bring greater attention to Asian cinema and Asian filmmakers. This year’s festival took place from March 7 through March 12 in Amsterdam, and Jia and Darunee took some time during the festival to come on The Channel. In this episode, we discuss the history of CinemAsia and how it fits into broader cultural conversations about diasporic cultures, Asian identity, and the politics of representation onscreen. You can find more information about the festival and its various programs at https://cinemasia.nl/en/.

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  • On this episode of The Channel, we’re bringing you a full episode from our friends over at the Center for South Asia at Stanford University. SASSpod is hosted by Lalita du Perron and features a regular stream of excellent, in-depth discussions. According to the show’s website, “The podcasts feature a wide range of topics, ranging from poetry to politics, from manuscript collecting to music, from business to Bollywood. Every podcast consists of an informal and infative conversation about South Asia and its meaning in the world, in our lives, and at Stanford.” We recommend that all of our listeners tune in and subscribe. In the episode of SASSpod that we're playing today, Lalita du Perron talks to Thenmozhi Soundararajan of Equality Labs about her forthcoming book The Trauma of Caste, survivor power, caste in Silicon Valley, the importance of mentorship, and healing for all.

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  • For our first episode of 2023, we’re bringing you a full episode from our friends over at East Asia for All, a podcast dedicated to all things East Asian pop culture. East Asia for All is hosted by Melissa Brzycki and Stephanie Montgomery, and according to the show’s website, “As pop culture nerds who also have a decade of experience living and traveling in East Asia, they have personally seen how people from outside of the region are engaging with its popular culture with increasing intensity and richness, but also how differences in language and culture often result in a limited understanding of pop cultural works.” On each episode, they discuss pop cultural products as both fans and academics, blending consumer appreciation with critical insight, and their episodes often come with pedagogical resources as well. It’s a great podcast, and we encourage you to tune in and subscribe to East Asia for All wherever you get your podcasts. In this crossover episode, the hosts – along with Gail Hershatter, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California Santa Cruz – have a fascinating discussion of the 2017 documentary Hooligan Sparrow, feminist activism, and political repression in contemporary China.

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  • On this episode, we welcome four guests to discuss democratic backsliding and rising authoritarianism in Southeast Asia, and also grassroots mobilizations in response to such phenomena. The first iteration of this group came together as a roundtable at the conference of the Canadian Council for Southeast Asian Studies in 2021. The convenor and chair of that roundtable was Nhu Truong. Nhu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Affairs at Denison University. She was joined by two more of our guests: Erik Martinez Kuhonta, Director of the Institute for the Study of International Development and Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University; and Maggie Shum, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Penn State Erie. Our fourth guest, Megan Ryan, was not part of the original roundtable, but her research is right in line with the theme of rising illiberalism in the region. She is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Michigan and was a 2020 United States Institute of Peace Scholar. In their conversation, the guests chat about political repression and resistance across Southeast Asia, comparing and contrasting different cases while always keeping the more global trend towards authoritarianism in view.


    This will be our last episode of 2022, and we want to thank everyone for tuning and making our first year such a success. We will be back next month, but in the meantime, we wish all of our listeners a happy holiday season and Happy New Year!


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  • Birgit Abels is professor of cultural musicology at the University of Göttingen. She has conducted ethnographic and ethnomusicological research in multiple sites across Asia, and she is the Principal Investoigor on the European Research Council project Sound Knowledge: Alternative Epistemologies of Music in the Western Pacific Island World. Today we are talking about Birgit’s new book, Music Worlding in Palau: Chanting, Atmospheres and Meaningfulness. The book was released in 2022 as part of the Global Asia series published by IIAS and Amsterdam University Press. Chanting holds a special place in Palau. In this conversation, Birgit discusses the theoretical dimension of her work and walks listeners through some specific field recordings. As you’ll hear, sound and music offer a window into much broader issues, raising questions of the self, community, politics, and becoming. Music Worlding in Palau was also released as an Open Access title, so it is free to download at the Amsterdam University Press website.

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  • Edwin Pietersma is an historian and anthropologist who specializes in modern and colonial Asian history. Broadly, his research focuses on the concepts of modernity and colonialism in Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand. Edwin is an alumni of a special initiative here at IIAS, the Dual Degree in Critical Heritage Studies of Asia and Europe. This program encourages an interdisciplinary, multi-sited, and critical approach to issues of heritage, broadly conceived. It is a partnership between multiple institutions, enabling students to study at multiple institutions over the course of the program. Through this course of study, Edwin received his MA in Asian Studies from Leiden University and his MA in Anthropology from National Taiwan University in Taipei, in addition to a certificate in Critical Heritage Studies from IIAS. In this conversation, Edwin and I discuss his experience of the program. For more information on Edwin's ongoing research, visit http://www.historywithedwin.com/.

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