Les résumés et les biographies des intervenants sont au lien suivant : http://ias.ubd.edu.bn/
Titre: Conference on “Changing Research Styles, Methodologies and Perspectives on Southeast Asia”
Organizers: Jeremy Jammes and Victor T. King
(from the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam)
Location: Brunei Darussalam.
Date: 30 – 31 July 2018
Rationale:
Going back to the epistemological roots of any research in the social sciences and humanities, this conference aims to question the ‘regime of truth’ generated at the data-gathering level. Are there still some research areas to explore in Southeast Asia studies? Are there Southeast Asian societies and cultures still considered as ‘exotic’’, not-yet-explored and ready for new scholarly investigation? Can we come up with new methodologies, research materials and concepts to understand the tumultuous and rapid transformation of Southeast Asian peoples and cultures? Out of these changes, what is new and exciting empirically and conceptually, and what has transformed our current understandings of the human condition in Southeast Asia? How have our changing approaches and the changing societies and cultures which we study influenced what we have discovered and how we have analyzed those findings in changing socio-cultural, economic and political contexts?
To tackle all these questions, our conference will give the opportunity to researchers in a range of disciplines embracing the social sciences and humanities to reflect on their personal relationship to the terrain, the fieldwork or the engagement with archives and library materials. But if a personal account might illuminate the motives and interests that could have inspired and edified research, it can also challenge our perceptions of the project of accessing and gathering research materials, the subject/object researched, and the societies themselves. We then need to incorporate changing approaches to field and library-/archival-based research: increasing team research, multi-site, trans-national, outsider-insider collaboration, multidisciplinary perspectives, increasing use of the internet and accessing materials beyond libraries and archives, the increasing importance of ‘the visual’, the materialities, the increasing concerns about reflexivity, the need to address the inexorable increase in the speed and complexity of change and the impulse of mobility (including the increasing urbanization of those populations which were primarily studied in rural contexts). Therefore, an important theme for conference participants will be based on a diachronic approach, encouraging researchers to reflect on and rethink their experiences of these changes both in their continuing personal and institutional research trajectories and in the ongoing need to address the ever-changing subjects of their studies.
Monday 30 July
9am-10am Welcoming Speech & Keynote
Arrival of the Guest of Honor
Speech by the organizers (Jeremy Jammes and Victor T. King)
Keynote:
The Importance of Being Wrong: Reflections on 35 Years of Methodological Blunders, Empirical Errors, Theoretical culs-de-sac, and Historical Misinterpretations
By Jonathan Rigg (Asia Research Institute and National University of Singapore, Singapore)
10am-10:30 Tea Break
10:30am-1pm Session 1
Personal Narratives from the Inside
Silencing as Method: Leaving Malay Studies Out?
By Syed Farid Alatas (Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, Singapore)
Engaging and Distancing: An Intellectual, Moral and Emotional Investment in the Field
By Hoon Chang Yau (Institute of Asian Studies and CARe, Brunei)
The Anthropology of Remembering: Memory as a Complementary Ethnography
By Zawawi Ibrahim (FASS and Institute of Asian Studies, Brunei)
Translating Brunei: Between Self-Reflexivity and Literary Study
By Kathrina Mohd Daud (FASS and Institute of Asian Studies, Brunei)
Addressing the Elephant in the Room: Islamic Governance and the Idea of Context
By Azmi Mohamad (Sultan Omar ‘Ali Saifuddien Centre for Islamic Studies, Brunei)
1pm-2:15pm Lunch at UBD
2:15pm-5:30pm Session 2
Re-exploring Southeast Asian Studies from the Outside
Methodologies and Mishaps: A Sociological-anthropological Gaze on Changing Perspectives in Southeast Asian Studies
By Victor T. King (Institute of Asian Studies, Brunei)
Salem to Sumatra (and more improvised itineraries): Reflections on a Quarter Century of Shifting Tacks
By R. Michael Feener (Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and University of Oxford, UK)
3:15pm-3:45pm Tea Break
Revisiting the Southeast Asian House: A Filipino’s Perspective
By Fernando N. Zialcita (Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines)
Race, Ethnicity, and Identity-formation in Southeast Asia
By Lian Kwen Fee (Institute of Asian Studies, Brunei)
The Generational and Digital Challenges to Southeast Asian Studies
By Liam C. Kelley (University of Hawai’i at Manoa, USA)
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Tuesday 31 July
9am-12pm Session 3
Betwixt and Between: Fluidity as a Norm?
Ethnography of the Homo Secretus: Inside Secret Societies and Societies with Secrets in Vietnam
By Jeremy Jammes (Institute of Asian Studies, Brunei)
Doing Fieldwork on the Sino-Vietnamese Border: Personal Experiences and Rethinking
By Pan Yanqin (College of ASEAN Studies, Guangxi University for Nationalities, China)
10am-10:30am Tea Break
Writing the ‘Local’, Provincial and Public into Regional-area Narratives
By Mala Rajo Sathian (Department of Southeast Asian Studies, University of Malaya, Malaysia)
Researching Borneo Language Description, Language Maintenance and Language Shift: Issues of Nomenclature and Shifting Identities
By James McLellan (FASS and Institute of Asian Studies, Brunei) and Noor Azam Haji-Othman (FASS, Brunei)
11:30am-12pm The future directions of Southeast Asian studies