Inya Institute 2024 Spring Newsletter

The Inya Institute Quarterly Newsletter

With all the setbacks the Tatmadaw has experienced in the past six months, the conscription law, which was reactivated in early February 2024, has been mobilizing all young men and women for the past two months. It is difficult to overstate the chaos that this move has caused among families in Myanmar. Many young people have taken the decision to leave their homes and families for Thailand and other countries. Others have decided to wait and see how the conscription will be handled by authorities. Media outlets reported that the first groups of conscripts were ready to embark on military training. It has also been reported that young men are being abducted by the army.

In our Winter newsletter, we had mentioned the repercussions of Operation 1027 on the capacity of two of our groups of Myanmar researchers based in Kachin state to conduct their field research. The disruptions caused by the conscription are now also undermining the work of three additional groups whose researchers are based in Myitkyina, Hakka, and Yangon and are all within the age group affected. Our junior researchers are doing their best: their commitment to completing the project in the context of these terrible circumstances affecting everyone in Myanmar must be praised. For those able to attend, the eight groups of researchers will present their findings on the

In this issue

occasion of the 2024 International Interdisciplinary Conference on Myanmar’s Borderlands (2024 IICMB) held at Chulalongkorn University on June 17-19, 2024. Their presentation will take the form of a workshop conducted just before the start of the conference. Regarding the conference itself, we have received a tremendous number of proposals with more than 100 paper, book, and roundtable submissions along with four organized panels. The Summer 2024 newsletter will include a full report about it!

We are delighted to announce the selection of 14 participants to the 2024 Overseas Faculty Development Seminar (OFDS). The two-week seminar held in Cambodia is administered by CAORC and presented by the Center for Khmer Studies (Cambodia) and our institute. It will offer participants a unique opportunity to gain knowledge and experience about the two countries. Read about the participants’ profiles on p.11.

Lastly, join us in congratulating our 2024 CAORCINYA Fellows! Our five new fellows include: Rachelle Saruya who is our Scholars’ Fellow; and Madeleine Hoecklin, Dominiquo Santistevan, Nicole Venker, and Teresa Chin who are our four Short-term Fellows. Read about their research topics on pp. 12–13.

The Inya Institute team in Yangon

Reflections from the field 3 “Under the Roof of Movement”, by Brendan Flanagan

Reflections from the field 6 “Imagined Futures: Myanmar Community Education in Malaysia”, by James Cerretani

Reflections from the field 10 “Cross-Border Cooperation and Identity: Support for a Better Future in Myanmar”, by Hasta Colman

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Institutional Members

Center for Burma Studies

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Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Northern Illinois University

Academic Board

Maxime Boutry, Centre Asie du Sud-Est, Paris

Jane Ferguson, Australian National University

Lilian Handlin, Harvard University

Bod Hudson, Sydney University

Mathias Jenny, Chiang Mai University

Ni Ni Khet, University Paris 1-Sorbonne

Alexey Kirichenko, Moscow State University

Christian Lammerts, Rutgers University

Mandy Sadan, University of Warwick

San San Hnin Tun, INALCO, Paris

Juliane Schober, Arizona State University

Nicola Tannebaum, Lehigh University (retd)

Alicia Turner, York University, Toronto

Center for Asian Research

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U Thaw Kaung, Yangon Universities’ Central Library (retd)

President: Catherine Raymond (Northern Illinois University)(retd)

Treasurer: Alicia Turner (York University, Toronto)

Secretary: François Tainturier

Jane Ferguson (Australian National University)

Lilian Handlin (Harvard University)

Nicola Tannenbaum (Lehigh University)(retd)

Thamora Fishel (Cornell University)

Aurore Candier (Northern Illinois University)

Reflections From the Field

Under the Roof of Movement

Brendan Flanagan, a PhD student at University of Hawai‘i-Manoa and 2023 CAORC-INYA Short-term Fellow, is interested in the politics of place, theories of social change, and how ecological relations are imagined in a time of crisis. Since September 2022 he has been based in Mae Sot, Thailand conducting research with exiled Burmese activists, as a research affiliate of the Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development (RCSD) at Chiang Mai University, in addition to working in grant management for Tenasserim Rivers and Indigenous People’s Network (TRIP-NET), a civil society organization based in Dawei. Brendan is also an educator in the field of earthen building techniques, a carpenter, and a gardener, who enjoys getting lost in the forest.

In late 2023, a banner was strung above a prominent intersection in Mae Sot, Thailand, advertising the impending grand opening of a new night club. That the name of this new entertainment venue was “The Safe House” and that this advertisement was hung directly adjacent to the Mae Sot Traffic Police Center was an ironic couplet not lost on many of the exiled Burmese activists, I was then spending all of my time with. The English term “safe house” was, after all, the way they referred to the houses, scattered throughout Mae Sot, that they shared with others like themselves, and one of the chief daily anxieties they faced as they navigated their way around the city was an encounter with Thai police, which, at the very least, would result in having to pay a bribe, and al-

ways carried with it the possibility of arrest. There was even an unsubstantiated rumor that the new club was owned by members of the local police, suggesting that the banner’s placement was a moment of trolling in real time, that Mae Sot’s elite establishment was signaling to the exile community that it was being watched. While parsing the veracity of such speculation is not my purpose here, I do think that the very fact that such a rumor circulated in the first place indicates the centrality of safe houses in the everyday imagination of exiled partisans of the Spring Revolution in Thailand. My intention here is to provide a brief glimpse of why that might be the case.

I lived on and off in Mae Sot, from September 2022 until March 2024, in household with a number of young Bur-

mese activists who run an internet radio platorm, called People’s Radio Myanmar. This temporary home functioned as one of many informal meeting locations for Mae Sot’s resistance diaspora, where all manner of daily activities (from the mundane to the solemn) took place. I encountered there an ever-fluctuating number of individuals, representing a diverse spectrum of politically engaged Burmese exiles. These variously included include CDM participants (teachers, doctors, civil servants, and even a police man), current and former members of various People’s Defense Force (PDF) groups, fighters in the clandestine Underground (UG), labor activists, former members of parliament and government ministries, artists, musicians, and imams. The heterodox “occupational”

Pic. 1: Shoes disorganized

composition of this community also mirrored the country’s myriad ethnic and religious diversity, providing an opportunity to think outside and beyond normative categories defining the parameters of ingroup belonging traditionally explored by anthropologists. For instance, our household was at various times composed of several Mon individuals, a number of Karen, a Rohingya, some Kachin youth and someone from Anya. These individuals were diversely Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim. Several were members of the LGBTQ community. There are many such houses found throughout Mae Sot, and within the

community they are often referred to as “safe houses”. Besides the obvious point that such spaces act as points of refuge for those fleeing from state violence and the security apparatus of Burma’s military regime, these safe houses are places where people who were often until recently strangers to each other have formed bonds of solidarity and mutual aid. I found that frequently members of these households had only become acquainted with each other while living in the forest where they had gone to join a PDF, under the protection of the KNU or another ethnic armed group. People often described meeting their “comrades”

while staying in Lay Kay Kaw near the Thai border, where many people fled after the military began its violent crackdown on non-violent protest during the spring of 2021. When Lay Kay Kaw itself experienced counter-insurgent airstrikes and military incursions, people once again fled, this time across the border to Mae Sot. Once in Mae Sot people once again found themselves “thrown together”, often moving into the same house with people they had only just met.

These safe houses can be understood as cross-ethnic, interfaith community knots of social creativity, where the inhabitants participate in ensuring the mo-

mentum of a collective political project in the face of immense adversity. They are places where a shared sense of hope and possibility is tempered by structural constraints (lack of proper identification, fear of the police), as well as by banal existential anxieties (economic precarity, worry for family/friends back home). Strangely, even though people consider themselves to be participating in a momentous event – a revolution – their lives are also sometimes quite boring. They are playing a waiting game. They wait for word from loved ones back home. They wait for approval of their legal status in Thailand, or the next step of their resttlement process. They wait for instructions regarding their next mission across the border. They wait for good news and they wait for bad news. Thus, anticipation and uncertainty can be understood as part of the structure of exile.

Representing a broad cross-section of the country’s religious, ethnic, linguistic, and class composition, those seeking

refuge in Mae Sot, have formed bonds of solidarity with “strangers”, in the shadow of state violence across the border. Safe houses are the places where the preoccupations animating the political imaginary of this accidental demographic are hashed out and argued over. They are the locations where the everyday practices that undergird the unfolding of a revolutionary ethics are enacted and evaluated. It within these safe houses that this improvised community nurtures, develops, and carries forward a revolution in a situation characterized by displacement, anxiety, fear, and precarity.

How did this novel, and perhaps unexpected, social formation institute itself under extremely circumscribed conditions? And what is the shared “language” that makes its continued elaboration possible? What are the routines and rituals that define the contours of this community? What are the outer limits of its bonds of solidarity? How is solidarity constructed across difference? And what

are the structural features that both condition the possibilities for social action, and are, in turn, amended by those emergent activities?

Paradoxically, in order to answer these questions, I have been thinking of exile as a particular type of place, a dense location of which displacement is, of course, one of the primary determinants. Mae Sot’s social density can be attested to by the fact that it has long been home to those, who for a variety of reasons, have been unable to make a future for themselves in Myanmar. Ethnic Karen refugees, persecuted members of Burma’s Muslim minority, and political activists, exiled during previous episodes of political upheaval, mingle with gem traders and migrant sweat-shop laborers. All of this serves as a reminder that the Burma-Thai border is an incomplete work of fiction that remains unstable in the face of persistent movement across the landscape it purports to divide. As relative newcomers, the Nwe

Pic. 2: Safe House

Oo (Spring) revolutionaries, stand out from some of Mae Sot’s other Burmese residents in that they have not resigned themselves making Thailand their home. They do not wish to settle. With the activities of their daily lives grounded in working towards the success of their revolution, their sense of time and place is marked by a tenacious, if sometimes uncertain, futurity; they remain unsettled. They remain suspended in movement. Safe houses are where much of this affective inertia plays out.

Of course, the lives of these activists are also shadowed by the enduring realities of factors such as economic precarity, nominal to illegal immigration status, police harassment, distance from family and loved ones, and ongoing trauma –

both that experienced personally and that felt by the collective social body. That is, at every step the work of imagining and creating an unforeclosed future is undertaken against the grain of a mundane social topography. There is a friction that arises between the aspirations of a social movement and the recalcitrant structures of life in exile. Practices aimed at extending the reach of mutual aid, widening networks of solidarity, and providing critical support for those suffering the consequences of the coup inside Burma are constrained by the dull weight of institutional inertia and how these activists creatively respond to those constraints, can be understood as a way of mapping out the parameters of the place exiled revolutionaries in Mae Sot make for themselves.

In the end, whether or not the Thai state was intentionally attempting to communicate to revolutionary Burmese exiles that they were being held watched is beside the point. Nobody I knew had ever been to The Safe House nightclub, but almost everyone I knew in Mae Sot was actively aware of the central role that safe houses played in their community. They were places where anxiety could be tempered in laughter and where solidarity as a shared conspiracy across difference could be nurtured without fear. If they were shelters of refuge and respite, they were also scenes of heated debate and critical evaluation. I rarely saw anyone dance, but a guitar was always at hand and song was abundant.

The CAORC-INYA Short-term Fellowship program for U.S. Graduate Students conducting research work on Myanmar/Burma in a third country is funded by CAORC through a grant from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. State Department.

Pic. 3: Food

Reflections From the Field

Imagined Futures: Myanmar Community Education in Malaysia

James Francis Cerretani, a 2023 CAORC-INYA Short-term Fellow, will begin a PhD in anthropology at the University of Southern California in fall 2024. Cerretani’s research focuses on the pre-existing work taking place by teachers, students, and the wider displacement-affected community in the context of community education for people of Myanmar in Malaysia. Focusing on schools run by and for transnational communities of Myanmar living in Malaysia and using participatory, multimodal methods, this project asks: How do community schools provide education tailored to transnational youths’ imagined futures? This research considers education broadly and schooling specifically, as the critical sites where ideas of belonging and futures—in relation to various actors’ projects of inclusion and everyday forms of exclusion—are imagined and constructed among transnational communities. Cerretani’s research has been supported by CAORC-INYA, Fulbright-IIE and MACEE.

I began conducting fieldwork focused on community education in Malaysia through connections I previously established with local community leaders, and providers of community-based education. I built these relationships during visits to Malaysia starting in 2018 and again in 2020. Then as the pandemic set in and lockdowns went into effect the learning centers closed down and I returned home. I sustained dialogue and relationships with teachers, organizers, and some of the families that the learning centers served.

I returned to Malaysia in June of 2023, teaching ethnography to American undergraduates through a summer study abroad program run by my alma Sarah Lawrence College and the Consortium of Forced Migration, Displacement and Education (CFMDE). We visited two learning centers in Kuala Lumpur, one specifically serving the Chin community and another broadly serving displaced families of Myanmar. With the support of the Inya fieldwork fellowship, and the Fulbright-IIE U.S. Research Award the rela -

In Malaysia where these transnational communities of Myanmar are unable to attend state schools, their efforts to collaborate with the wider displacement-affected community towards their goals of preparing youth for futures, and how those futures are imagined among the community, has opened deep perspectives into the human condition, and the existential concerns of these communities who face increasing displacement from Myanmar under the current military regime.

tionships sown at these learning centers over years began to sprout into a research program.

I was able to immerse myself from the onset of my fellowship period. I headed to a small, rural village in Kedah state where the community was expecting me. I had co-planned a teaching and research program with a faith-based organization (FBO) that offers support to a community learning center in the village as well as four other centers in two urban areas in Kedah state.

Caption 1: “Today is So Very Very Happy”, Placemaking-Polaroid by Sajida & Iskander

After some days working with the head teacher, who is a member of the Rohingya community, we began working with the students and volunteers using multimodal approaches to understanding the placemaking processes within the community.

The learning center had just changed sites, from previously operating in an annex-hall for community events operated by a local mosque, to a large independent house with an attached yard. The initial days at the learning center were spent cleaning up rubbish in the coconut and mango tree-filled yard connected to the center. Students were very involved and learning about taking care of their environment, and the need to reduce litter, plastic, and rubbish build-up. We also started composting and designating areas for vegetable and herb gardens which would work in a balance of agriculture and permaculture next to the nearby forest where foraging and learning about the native plant species is possible.

The young students, ages 6-16, were in a constant state of creativity, drawing and writing about their new learning environment. The teachers, students, and I came up with a visualplacemaking project, in which students would pair up and embed their portrait, made with an instant camera, onto a sheet of paper and then draw and scrawl their interests and significant surroundings onto the page. Through amalgamations of photo, drawing, and text the students made visual what they deemed significant in their surroundings. Through a reflection upon varying spaces and their importance to the day to day lives of the students a sense of place becomes more clarified. Teachers and volunteers gained a greater sense of what and why these places were valued by the students, this opened up discussions centering around the students’ sense of belonging and enabled teachers to tailor curriculum, and lessons based on these reflections. Using multimodal methods developed collaboratively with the community collaboratively during this fieldwork for an image and deeper sense of the ways meaning was being made through the spaces the students inhabit.

This fieldwork has opened a wider view into anthropological ideas around futurity. Specifically, the ways in which communities plan and organize to educate their youth in order to prepare them for futures is a very human concern.

By exploring questions at the nexus of pedagogy, personhood, and the relations of power in a post-colonial, transnational context, I have gained a better sense of the important role community education plays in hyper-diverse settings such as Malaysia and the United States.

This fieldwork enables me to contribute to research on community education in its unique analysis of community education centers run primarily by the communities themselves as opposed to the more commonly researched community education centers that are facilitated by large (I)NGO’s. The ethnography of my fieldwork comes into dialogue with anthropological literatures concerned with the new forms of citizenship, kinship, and sociality developed by refugee populations adapting to displaced contexts and how these interface with, resist, and maintain existing forms by visualizing the backstage of community schools for transnational communities, thus drawing closer the streams that connect and dissect anthropological inquiries of identity, belonging, and citizenship.

The fieldwork period has pushed forth my research greatly, opening and expanding to questions and substantive insights into the meanings and importance of future-making for Myanmar youth, and how it relates to anthropological inquiries of the existential, and cultural heritage in the face of forced migration. Additionally the Inya fieldwork has brought new research questions about the forming of affinities among diverse groups and the aims and shared goals which can be achieved through these affinities: How these groups continue to harbor their own ethnic and cultural identity and celebrate difference whilst complexly connecting to others is a question which has great capacity to be explored within Myanmar and among the Myanmar diaspora worldwide.

The CAORC-INYA Short-term Fellowship program for U.S. Graduate Students conducting research work on Myanmar/Burma in a third country is funded by CAORC through a grant from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. State Department.

Caption 2: “Our Street”, Placemaking-Polaroid by Noor Hasoon & Nur Sharan

Reflections From the Field

Cross-Border Cooperation and Identity: Thai-based Support for a Better Future in Myanmar

Hasta Colman is in her 4 th year of the PhD program at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Relations and one of our 2023 CAORC-INYA Short-term Fellows . Her thesis topic concerns border politics and relations between China and South and Southeast Asia, particularly Myanmar and Nepal. She spent over ten years working with grassroots organizations and international NGOs in South and Southeast Asia on development projects, with particular focus on developing indicator frameworks to measure community impact. Hasta holds a bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College and a master’s degree from The University of Chicago. She held research fellowships and studied at Fudan University (Shanghai), Tsinghua University (Beijing), and National Taiwan University (Taipei). She is fluent in Mandarin, speaks novice-level Karen (thanks to the intensive courses offered by The Inya Institute), and has just begun learning Thai.

With the generous funding of The Inya Institute, I made two research trips to Thailand last year. During those trips I focused on engaging with three groups. First, in order to set the stage and get a high-level overview of cooperation along the Thai Myanmar border, I met with some researchers and people working for international aid organizations in Bangkok. Secondly, I focused most of my time engaging with grassroots NGOs that were either Thai-based and cooperating with My -

anmar counterparts or were formerly based in Myanmar prior to the coup but were mostly based in Bangkok and Chiang Mai for security reasons. The third group I worked with was Karen villagers in Northern Thailand.

My personal journey to this work

I first want to acknowledge that I came into this work with some background working with grassroots organizations in Myanmar and northern Thailand. I was

lucky to have contacts, some of whom I had known for over fifteen years, who were willing to share with me quite openly. I am immensely grateful for their willingness to share their experiences. Additionally, I owe special thanks to my mother, whose international youth work provided me with initial opportunities to engage with these communities as early as 2007. Finally, I would like to thank my undergraduate advisor, Joshua Muldavin, who first took me to a county near the Myanmar border in Yunnan, China, in 2012.

Pic. 1: Karen refugees from Myanmar farm cash crops on land rented to them by Thai Karen people

During the trip in 2012, we interviewed farmers in a mountain village near Baoshan, discussing how their crops and lives were changing as a result China’s enormous afforestation program. The farmers were planting eucalyptus trees, along with walnut and several other kinds as part of a policy program designed to combat the environmental consequences of over-logging while also generating cash for the provincial government. The primary ethnic group in this area were the Achang people, but they lived in a normally administered Chinese village (i.e. not an ethnic township or 民族乡minzuxiang).

Border Peoples

While conducting fieldwork in Baoshan, I witnessed dozens of logging trucks coming from the nearby border. Chinese demand for timber, no longer supplied by the domestic market, had caused a sharp increase in illegal logging in semi-autonomous ethnic regions in Myanmar. The Achang are known as the Maingtha in Myanmar, but the dividing line between the two peoples is wholly artificial, as they share a language, culture, and kinship networks that predate modern international boundaries. The very same policy aimed at preventing the erosion of Achang farmland in Yunnan was destroying the environment of their kin across the border in Myanmar.

Witnessing this false dichotomy, and the resource paradox it engendered, inspired my interest in identity and nation-

building in the borderlands of South and Southeast Asia, the topic of my ongoing doctoral research. With the support of the fellowship from The Inya Institute, I hoped to explore a specific facet of this phenomena on the Thai Myanmar border: the impact of Karen identity on post-coup organizing across national boundaries. Following this research plan, I asked questions about organizing, activism, and cross-border cooperation. But the answers I got concerned displacement, home, longing, sense of duty, grief, trauma and healing.

Perspectives from those who cannot return home: resistance organizers working in exile

There was one woman, whom I will call Moe, that all the people I met in Bangkok kept telling me I should interview. The Thai organization in Bangkok where I was based held a special threeday workshop on trauma and healing for Myanmar organizers with a peace activist from South Africa. Moe came to Bangkok for the workshop. Afterwards, old friends caught up over a casual barbeque (cooking over coals in cement buckets) and I got to meet her. She seemed reticent to speak but very polite. Everyone kept saying, “she works on monitoring” the ongoing conflict. Moe will “know more about what you’re interested in.”

A couple of weeks later in Chiang Mai we met again at a group event. I didn’t want to press her. I was keenly aware that

as an outsider with ‘no skin in the game’ my questions were an imposition for these activists, working as they were with limited resources, through unimaginable grief, and against enormous logistical obstacles. After three days of planning and meetings, this evening was their chance to celebrate and let loose, to enjoy their time together before Myanmarbased organizers slipped back through various border crossings, and others went to Bangkok or Mae Sot.

As the evening wore on, she began to open up. Moe spoke about the nature of monitoring work, that she felt like she was always rushing to put out a new fire. Although she was working constantly, she felt like she was doing nothing – she could only watch and take note. And each day brought more news of death. She said, although she was monitoring each incident as it happened, she had no time or space to zoom out and look at the connections between events, or between the different organizations, both civilian and military, impacting the resistance.Although she said my questions were too broad for her to answer, she spoke on an even larger, global scale about the international community’s role in the conflict. Moe expressed the great disappointment she and others felt towards the US, the UN, ASEAN, and other countries in the region. She said that, despite the lack of support from outside, she and her colleagues were committed to peace, democracy, and a better future. As her co-organizer said, “I must do what I can for my country.”

Pic. 2: The site of many discussions on identity, conflict and healing

Perspectives from those struggling at home: people on the ground in Myanmar

Another interviewee, whom I will call Jo, told me a story of his trip from Loikaw to Chiang Mai. He said things were changing so rapidly that even if you were well connected and constantly monitored Signal and other communications, you never knew what would happen. We tried to add each other’s Signal, having not spoken for several years, but his number would change as soon as he got back inside the country. Because of this he said it was better to get his new contact in a week from a Chiang Mai based colleague, who would have it then. As far as he knew he wasn’t blacklisted, but that could change at any point. When traveling from Loikaw to come to Thailand he was stopped at a newly erected checkpoint. The soldiers went through his laptop, questioned him, and threatened

him. Luckily, there was no information on his computer about the organization or the meeting he was joining.

They let him go, but it was a nervewracking experience. He said he was very scared. He didn’t know what he might encounter going home. As one of the few organizers in his group not yet blacklisted, he was a key conduit on the ground. Jo works continuously, overcoming so many barriers, to help get supplies, food, medicine, and other assistance to people who need it most, particularly in the border areas. And he does this with the constant awareness that he could be blacklisted, persecuted, or killed for his involvement at any moment.

Perspectives from those for whom the host country is home

Events like the trauma-informed healing workshop in Bangkok show

the deeper ways that Thai organizers, particularly veteran activists and their networks, support Myanmar activistsin-exile. I went into this research with a focus on ethnic identity. However, in the organizations where I conducted participant observation and informal focus groups, I found that collective identities solidified much more around national unity than I expected. Hope for the country of Myanmar as a multi-ethnic nation largely eclipsed ethno-nationalist aspirations. Similarly, many activists in Bangkok spoke of Mekong regional identity, extending from Cambodia to Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Myanmar. Although my study was too limited in scope to make such bold claims about the region or movement, the people I interviewed left a deep impression of collective duty, of interregional and generation-spanning hope for healing, and for a diverse and democratic future for Myanmar.

The CAORC-INYA Short-term Fellowship program for U.S. Graduate Students conducting research work on Myanmar/Burma in a third country is funded by CAORC through a grant from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. State Department.

What

2024 Languages of Myanmar Course Series

Karen – S’gaw

Kachin – Jinghpaw Shan – Tai Long

Online registration for International Applicants opening in May!

The Inya Institute is pleased to announce its 2024 language course series on three prominent languages spoken in Myanmar: (1) Kachin – Jinghpaw; (2) Karen - S’gaw; and (3) Shan - Tai long.

The three-week language course will equip participants with the essential skills needed to communicate confidently and effectively in Shan language in a broad range of situations. Our team of language teachers received training from and had course materials reviewed by U.S. trained language instructors.

No prior knowledge of these languages is required.

Who

The language course is open to undergraduate, graduate, postgraduate students, professionals, researchers, and NGO workers of any nationality, wherever they are based in Myanmar, Southeast Asia or the U.S.

The language of instruction will be English.

Stay tuned to our Facebook page for upcoming information about the registration!

Upcoming Program

Congratulations to the fourteen faculty members from US community colleges and minority-serving institutions who have been selected to participate in Between Political and Climate Change in Southeast Asia in May 2024!

This seminar, administered by CAORC in collaboration with its member center in Cambodia, the Center for Khmer Studies, and the member center in Myanmar, the Inya Institute, funds participation in a two-week seminar that will feature lectures, meetings with media professionals, civil society and environmental organizations, and site visits, this two-week overseas faculty development seminar held in Cambodia and presented by Overseas Research Centers in Cambodia and Myanmar will offer participants a unique opportunity to gain knowledge and

Azzarina Basarudin, Assistant Professor, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, California State University, Long Beach, CA

Jordan Cooper, Staff/Administrator, Nursing St. Louis Community College, St. Louis, MO

Joseph Donica, Professor, English, Bronx Community College, Bronx, NY

Andrew Gaber, Instructor-General Studies and Instructor-Political Science at College of the Muscogee Nation/Connors State College, OK

Tanya Greenfeld, Associate Professor, English (ESL)

Prince George’s Community College, Largo, MD

Matthew Hacholski, Adjunct Instructor, History

Santa Ana College, Santa Ana, CA

Ji Yong Kim, Assistant Professor, Art and Design Raritan Valley Community College, Branchburg, NJ

experience about the two countries. It will also leave time to explore Cambodia’s history, culture, and natural habitats with visits to ancient temples and the city of Angkor, the Tonle Sap Lake, museums and sites in Cambodia’s capital city of Phnom Penh, and more.

The Overseas Faculty Development Seminars are fully-funded overseas seminars that help faculty and administrators at US community colleges and minority-serving institutions gain international experience with the aim of developing and improving international courses, curricula, and teaching materials at their home institutions.

The 2024 awardees are:

Liberty Peterson, Assistant Professor, Social Science Snow College, Ephraim, UT

Colleen Pilgrim, Professor, Psychology Schoolcraft College, Livonia, MI

Philip Ross, Instructor, English Southeast Community College, Lincoln, NE

Andre Stevenson, Professor, Health and Human Studies

Elizabeth City State University, Elizabeth City, NC

Margaret Taylor, Professor, Behavioral and Social Sciences

Greenville Technical College, Greenville, SC

Jason Torreano, Instructor, Humanities, Bloomfield College of Montclair State University, Bloomfield, NJ

Paul Whitaker, Professor, Biology University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, Wausau, WI

The Overseas Faculty Development Seminar in Cambodia is carried out in partnership with the Center for Khmer Studies and the Inya Institute and is funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Congratulations to our new fellows!

Madeleine Hoecklin holds a Masters Degree in International Affairs at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, with a focus on Global Security and Global Health. Of her project titled “Facing the Impact of Climate Change and Armed Conflict in Myanmar: Strategies for conflict-sensitive climate adaptation”, she says: “The 2021 mili -

tary coup in Myanmar has not only led to a human rights and humanitarian crisis, but has also escalated climate vulnerability in a country already poorly equipped for climate adaptation. Intersecting issues of conflict and climate change have the potential to have far reaching impacts on the livelihoods, health, and security of the population, particularly indigenous

Nicole Venker is a Ph.D. student at Cornell University. Her dissertation, “Living off the Land, Labor, and the Refugee Condition on the Thai-Burma border” examines how everyday land relations are experienced and negotiated by Burmese refugees in the context of transnational migration. Combining participatory research with US-based refugee communities and institutional geographies of relocation/resettlement organizations, she theorizes “refugee land relations” as the complexset of political/environmental subjectivities produced in the confluence of bordering, resource, and labor regimes. She will conduct an institutional ethnography of Thailand-based refugee assistance, resettlement, and labor organizations, mediating migration flows from Myanmar, to investigate the socio-political-mechanisms that facilitate or constrain refugees’ access to land and livelihood along the Thai-Burma border. The research fieldwork for her project will be conducted in Thailand, Mae Sot, Chiang Mai, and Bangkok from May to September 2024.

Dominiquo Santistevan is a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. His project titled “Birth of Burma in the International: Revisiting the 1897 Creation of the Lieutenant-Governor of Burma” examines the nineteenth century European “New Imperialism” which marks a period of intense political-territorial transformation in mainland Southeast Asia. Much of

peoples. The climate adaptation and natural resource policies of opposition institutions and ethnic governance bodies will be examined and recommendations developed for climate change actions in the conflict-affected context of Myanmar.” The research fieldwork for her project will be conducted in Thailand, Mae Sot from April to July 2024.

Teresa Chin is B.A. student in Neurology at Rice University. Her research project entitled “Prevalence and attitudes toward tobacco chewing and smoking among Thantlang refugees in Mizoram” will span nine weeks across various cities in Mizoram and investigate tobacco chewing and smoking among Thantlang refugees. Building on previous field research, she aims to understand the prevalence, history, and attitudes toward these habits, considering the impact of the 2021 military coup. Methods include interviews with community leaders and surveys for individuals’ personal experiences with tobacco, as well as observations. Through this comprehensive approach she seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the topic in order to inform policies and changes to combat this public health issue. The research fieldwork for her project will be conducted in Delhi, Aizawl, Sangau, Saiha, and Lawngtlai in Mizoram from June to August 2024.

the political-territorial reshuffling, however, largely drew to a close during the opening years of the twentieth century in what may be called the terminus of the age of European territorial expansion. While the annexation of Upper Burma marks one moment of political appropriation, the consolidation of regional territorial stability marks another moment,

establishing an inter-imperial “order” at a larger scale. What were the conditions of this transformation, how was it institutionalized, and how might the subsequent stability of this arrangement be explained are some of the questions that this research will address. The research fieldwork for his project will be conducted in the U.K. from July to September 2024.

Congratulations to our new fellows!

Dr. Rachelle Saruya is a Ph.D. graduate from the University of Toronto. Her project titled, “Wishing at the Banyan Tree: Wishing-for-Children Rituals in the Buddhist Scriptures and in Contemporary Myanmar Women’s Practices”, argues that, in lived Buddhism, having children and the symbolism of

motherhood may have helped Theravada Buddhism to flourish in Southeast Asia (Andaya 2002), yet not having children and the renunciation of householder life also led to an increase in women’s renunciation practices (Langenberg 2017). This project starts with the former and at the beginning of the process of hav-

Annual Membership at Inya

ing children and rituals on wishing for children. Rachel explores these rituals and why certain sites were chosen, in addition to looking at the material aspects of the rituals and how these rituals help women during vulnerable periods in their lives. She will conduct her research in Japan from June to August 2024.

Membership of the Inya Institute is now available for Instituions as well as Individuals!

Despite Myanmar’s current multidimensional crisis, the Inya Institute continues to operate in Yangon providing educational and training opportunities to Myanmar students, supporting scholarship by Myanmar and International researchers in Myanmar and in third countries, and offering language learning opportunities for those interested in Myanmar’s linguistic diversity. It is also one of the few libraries currently open to the public in Yangon. Interconnectedness between Myanmar, the U.S., the Myanmar diaspora in the U.S. and elsewhere is more important than ever and the institute is keen to support this value as shown by its activities listed above. You can be part of this so please consider becoming a member of the Inya Institute! Contact us at: contact@inyainstitute.org

INSTITUTIONAL MEMBERSHIP

Any recognized academic or educational institution in the United States or Canada may become an Institutional Member of the institute. If a representative of an institutional member chooses to send a delegate to serve on the board of directors, he/she has an opportunity to shape the institute’s programs and activities.

Other benefits include: (1) Recognition of institutional member status in the institute’s quarterly newsletter; (2) Publishing of members’ scholarly events in the institute’s quarterly newsletter; (3) Invitation to join online events, including conferences and webinars, organized by the institute.

Annual institutional membership dues are $400.

INDIVIDUAL MEMBERSHIP

Anyone may become an Individual Member of the institute, upon application and acceptance by the institute.

Benefits: (1) Inclusion in the institute’s listserv of those institutions and individuals receiving the quarterly’s newsletter; (2) Invitation to join online events, including conferences or webinars, organized by the institute; (3) Reduced fees for the language learning opportunities developed by the institute.

Annual individual membership dues are $25.

At the Yangon Office

As the Inya Institute explores research-practice partnerships with Myanmar-based post-secondary community schools, we introduce you to our two new interns. They will, under the guidance of Pyae Phyoe Myint, our Education and Training Manager, conduct a six-month needs assessment developed in collaboration with representatives of five community schools. Join us in welcoming them to our team!

Khin Lai Lai Wai Gwa Township, Rakhine State

This is Khin Lai Lai Wai, 23 years old, originally from Gwa Township, Rakhine State. I define myself as a Bisexual Arakanese girl. I intially started a university program, majoring in Archaeology, with the support of the Davitaw Scholarship in Norway. However, this opportunity was lost in 2020. Consequently, I shifted my interest to empowering my community. I offered guidance to over 20 high school students from rural areas who had different needs. Simultaneously, I spent time developing my skills as an awareness trainer at the Gwa Youth Club. I have also volunteered six months with the Myanmar Health Assistant Association (MHAA) to give awareness related to the Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) to adolescents. My interest in community mobilization has been also directed to the environmental sustainability of the YSEALI unified projects, in cooperation with Thant Myanmar. I led the awareness training about the harmful effects of plastic and garbage to both urban and rural areas.

Aside from this volunteer work, I restarted my academic journey with a Diploma of Social Science and Master of Public Affairs (MPA) conducted by post-secondary schools, both specializing in Advanced Social Research, 2022-2023. I completed many peace education programs run by George Mason Univer-

Su Nay Chi Nwe Yangon Region

I am Su Nay Chi Nwe, 22 years old, with a Karen-Burmese background. I recently joined the Inya Institute as a research survey intern. I passed the Matriculation exam in 2018 and studied Tourism and Hospitality Management at Mandalar University for about 2 years. When the Covid-19 pandemic and Military coup began, I decided to study online instead of returning to university. I have always dreamed of becoming a teacher; so during this time, I focused on making that dream a reality. I have been working in the teaching sector for about 4 years since 2020. Additionally, I have been volunteering with non-profit organizations, helping marginalized young people facing education challenges due to the military coup. It is fulfilling to be part of the effort providing these students with quality education during this crisis. I am so proud of being part of this community of students

sity, humanitarian affairs and public health, project management & data analytics programs. Furthermore, I was an enumerator in the projects of International Organization for Migration (IOM) and People In Need (PIN). Currently I am volunteering as a General Assistant (GA) with the Me Group of Companies Limited.

During my current internship at Inya, I am able to pursue my interest in academic research as a survey research intern. I get to work closely with senior experts, an opportunity that will help me enhance my skills, and develop my networks. This internship also offers me the chance to contribute to real-world projects in a way that deeply resonates with my career goals. Inya offers me the opportunity to implement the key parts of research process like initial observation through social media posts, websites and other channels, collecting and analyzing data related to educational activities and programs conducted by local educational organizations and community schools, conducting interviews with students, and direct/indirect beneficiaries. These different tasks will help me implement a mini research for my Master Thesis (MPA). They also provide me with a template on how to conduct future quality research projects on social issues and how these issues may be tackled members of my community.

In the current context, it is difficult to get a full time job for young people. Therefore, I strongly expect that Inya’s part-time internship will offer me an opportunity to further develop my skills. I am also hoping to be involved in writing research grant proposals and receive mentoring from Inya’s experienced team.

who is able to help other young students achieve access to quality education during the crisis. I didn't have any prior research experience before joining in 2023 the Research Diploma in Sustainable Development at the Community Leadership & Research Institute of the Thabyay Education Foundation. During this program, I conducted a research paper about Community Based Education Programs in Myanmar. After completing the program, I had the opportunity to contribute to a national research paper on Non-formal Education as a Bago regional researcher with Cherry Myay Academy. These experiences strengthened my interest in research within the education sector.

So, all the above experiences and my new interest in education led to this internship as a survey research intern at Inya Institute. I am so glad to be part of the Inya Family and have the opportunity to apply the knowledge I have gained. My responsibilities include developing interview questionnaires, reaching out to local educational organizations and community schools, conducting online surveys and interviews, and assisting with grant proposals. I am excited to continue growing my research skills and contributing to Inya Institute's initiatives.

Upcoming Events across the U.S. and beyond

1. Extracting Religion in Myanmar

Location: Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue, Yale University

Date: April 24, 2024, 12pm (in-person)

Speaker: Alexandra Kaloyanides

Attention to natural resources and their extractive labor sheds new light on the co-formation of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam in Myanmar. Myanmar’s natural resources have long shaped its religious life. Gold mined from its rivers covers the country’s towering pagodas. Teak from its tropical forests built the last Buddhist royal capital. Rubies from upland regions adorn Gotama statues. And rare earth metals extracted from conflict zones finance the contemporary military regime. Throughout its history Myanmar’s ruling powers claimed they had a natural right to monopolize extractive industries in service to the Buddhist tradition. With a focus on artifacts and texts from Burma’s Konbaung period (1752–1885 CE), this presentation argues that Burmese political and religious institutions used extractive industries to fashion Buddhist sovereignty. Along the way, it demonstrates how attention to natural resources and extractive labor changes the structure of relationships in religious history.

More info here.

2. Burmese

Buddhist Exceptionalism and the Violence of Religious Tolerance

Location: Center for East Asian Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Date: April 25, 2024, 5:15 - 6:45pm

Speaker: Alicia Turner

Early European accounts of Burma expressed shock at the presence of what they understood to be liberal modern values imbedded in what would soon be a British colony in Southeast Asia. Burma was, to them, an exception in Asia, where religious tolerance and freedom for women were enshrined. After a half a century of this discourse, that elevated Burmese above Indians and Chinese, late nineteenth century scholars the origin of these surprisingly modern values in Buddhism, shifting them from the essence of a people to a World Religion. In these depictions the Buddha becomes a great liberator, who has freed Asian people to live in line with European Liberalism. And yet as much as this discourse valorized Burmese people and Buddhism, it

worked to racialize Hindus and Muslims with devastating implications into the present. Working with Wendy Brown’s theories, Turner develops an account of how tolerance racializes religious difference.

More info here

3. Addiction and Rehabilitation in Military Myanmar

Location: The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave, USA

Date: April 25, 2024, 12:20-1:30pm

Speaker: Joshua Mitchell

Burma is home to the world’s longest running armed conflict. It is also the world’s second largest producer of heroin and Asia’s largest producer of methamphetamines. Studies of the drugwar relationship in Burma are top-down. They concern the way elite agreements, such as ceasefires between belligerents, shape patterns of drug production, peace, and conflict. As a population that is commonly represented in Burma as the epitome of wasted male labor addicts are made into a labor pool that both militaries and churches can rehabilitate, deploy, or abandon. The social value of the addict is structured but the shifting contingencies of war and the shifting demands for military manpower. Centering the life stories of soldier-addicts shows the ways these men create and contest practices and imaginations of war, as well as their role in it. Yet the stories also reveal the way they often become ensnared in circuits of rehabilitation and conscription. These are produced by a diffuse array of religious and military institutions that hold conflicting ideologies, identities, and intentions, yet create a shared military order: the military-religious complex. More info here

4. Interdisciplinary Myanmar Conference 2024 Myanmar’s International Role: More Than a Buffer State Location: Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic

Date: June 21st-23rd, 2024

The Myanmar-Institut e. V. (Berlin) and the Palacky University Olomouc (in particular the project “The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region” - EUVIP) cordially invite you to participate in the next Interdisciplinary Myanmar Conference entitled “Myanmar’s International

Role: More Than a Buffer State”. The conference will bring together students and researchers of the country and the region.

The conference is free of charge and will be held on-site at the Palacky University Olomouc in Olomouc, Czechia. The possibility for online participation is planned. The conference will start on 21 June 2024 mid-day with a (tentative) keynote speech by Catherine Renshaw from Western Sydney University, and continue with panels on Friday afternoon, Saturday, and Sunday morning. Each panel will have a convener and a commentator who will comment on the presented papers. For the evenings, cultural events are planned. More information will be forthcoming on the program. More info here

5. Assemblages of the Future: Rethinking Communities after the State Location: Chiang Mai University

Date: August 2 – 4, 2024

The International Conference on Burma /Myanmar Studies (ICBMS) committee would like to invite submissions for ICBMS4, which will be hosted at Chiang Mai University on the 2nd – 4th August 2024, titled: ‘Assemblages of the Future: Rethinking Communities after the State’. Three years after the coup and amid desperate circumstances, the people of Myanmar have responded with renewed thought and action to reimagine the present and future for themselves and their communities. As it has become clear that many traditional forms of authority have had their power eroded – notably the inability of the Myanmar “state” to carry out basic functions – such emergent realities present both opportunities and challenges.

The “assemblages” of the future refers to new “entangled ways of life,” what Anna Tsing calls the “mosaic of temporal rhythms and spatial arcs” as taking place in Myanmar of 2024. This framing asks scholars to situate their work within this contested reality, and ask critical questions about the emergent future.

In particular, this refers to the complex rhythms of Myanmar’s social reality, where many aspects of culture, power and life have been transformed after the coup, yet others remain stubbornly intact – for better or worse. More info here

New Books On Myanmar

Contested Civil Society in Myanmar Local Change and Global Recognition

Maaike Matelski

Bristol University Press, 2023

This book centres on various contestations in Myanmar society and illustrates the ways in which these are reflected in civil society. It offers a concise overview of recent political developments in the country, from the short-lived attempts at democratisation to the 2021 military coup, and analyses the involvement of various civil society actors, as well as their international supporters. It incorporates multiple identities and fault lines in Myanmar society and explains how these influence diverse perceptions, framing and agenda setting as political developments unfold. The book provides an up-to-date overview of the main identities and contestations within Myanmar’s civil society and, by extension, within Myanmar society as a whole.

Myanmar A Political Lexicon

Nick Cheeseman

Cambridge University Press, 2024

Myanmar: A Political Lexicon is a critical inquiry into how words animate politics. Across sixteen entries the lexicon stages dialogues about political speech

and action in this country at the nexus of South, East and Southeast Asia. This element offers readers venues in which to consider the history and contingency of ideas like power, race, patriarchy and revolution. Contention over these and other ideas, it shows, does not reflect the political world in which Myanmar’s people live—it realizes it.

A Maze

Ma Thida

Balestier Press, April 2024

This book explains how the 2008 Constitution, some significant past political incidents and maneuvers and deeply rooted social and structural obstacles were like walls of the complex maze which made Myanmar people get lost. It also explains why they couldn’t reach anywhere near the destination of democracy though they have been walking miles after miles, hills after hills, and pits after pits. This book also explains how the 2021 Myanmar Spring Revolution is moving fast forward with its strenuous efforts, how it is trying to tear down those walls of maze, and why some old and new complicated corners still exist and have appeared.

Unseen Burma: Early Photography 1862-1962

Thweep Rittinaphakorn River Books, 2023

When the British colonized Burma, they brought with them the latest technology in cameras and photographic reproduction, and since these were introduced to Burma as early as the middle of the 19th century, the country is richly cataloged and photographed. The new technology was first popularized by western practitioners (Germans, Italians, and, of course, the British) and upper-class patrons, but then spread to the mass market. Unseen Burma takes readers on a stunning visual journey from the beginning of Burma, its colonial era, through to the hopeful first years of independence.

NGOs Mediating Peace Promoting Inclusion in Myanmar’s Nationwide Ceasefire Negotiations

Julia Palmiano Federer

Springer International Publishing, 2023

This book examines the role of non-governmental (NGO) mediators in promoting “inclusive peace” to negotiating parties in Myanmar’s Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) negotiations from 2011-2015. The author argues that NGO mediators, traditionally seen as part of civil society or as weak mediators with little power or leverage, have become established mediation actors alongside more formal actors and are redefining the mediation field through norm promotion. The outcome of the NCA process presents a critical and cautionary tale of promoting a presumed universal norm into a given locale and expecting a certain outcome without understanding how an external norm interacts with existing normative frameworks.