2020 Events

Mid-career researchers researching Southeast Asia and based in the Greater Sydney region are invited to attend a dedicated writing retreat at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre. This retreat is designed to provide you with some much-needed company and motivation to continue with your research in what has been a challenging year.  

Postgraduate students and early to mid-career researchers focusing on Southeast Asia are invited to attend a dedicated writing retreat. This retreat is designed to provide you with both inspiration and peer support to kick off the year.

Armed with smartphones, face masks and three-finger salutes, young people all over Thailand have been leading the country's largest anti-government protests in decades. Seemingly emerging out of nowhere, millennials and Gen Z took to the streets and on social media to make radical demands to reform the country's politics, economy and the monarchy. What explains this youth revolt? This live panel discussion brought in experts on Thailand to discuss the current protests from a diverse range of perspectives, including historical legacy, military-monarchy relations, youth culture, protest language, generational divide and grievances against the Prayuth regime.

The Symposium seeks to promote interdisciplinary research and education between partners in Vietnam and the University of Sydney. The central theme of the symposium is "improving lives through collaborative research and education".

Join us for a workshop on doing fieldwork in Southeast Asia in the time of COVID-19.

Prejudices against religious minorities are inherent in the hegemonic narrative of Thai identity, but these have recently taken a new form. Anti-Muslim sentiments in Thailand developed from the protracted Southern conflict that saw Buddhist victimisation at the hands of Malay Muslim insurgents. The narrative of ‘Buddhism under threat’ has been circulating online and offline, identifying particularly an external offence of Muslims who wish to capture the Thai state.

Early career researchers researching Southeast Asia and based in the Greater Sydney region are invited to attend a dedicated writing retreat at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre. This retreat is designed to provide you with some much-needed company and motivation to continue with your research in what has been a challenging year.

Social media has become a crucial avenue for political discourse in Southeast Asia, given its potential as a “liberation technology” in both democratising and authoritarian states. Yet the growing decline in internet freedom and increasingly repressive and manipulative use of social media tools by governments means that social media is now an essential platform for control. “Disinformation” and “fake news” production is growing rapidly, and national governments are creating laws which attempt to address this trend, but often only exacerbate the situation of state control.

Many general elections in Singapore over the years have been described as “watershed”, but could the latest one on 10 July be a definitive turning point? Our distinguished panel will debate and deliberate whether Singapore is headed for a two-party system, and what we can expect ahead as the new Parliament is sworn in on 24 August 2020.

This event seeks to compare legal perspectives on the experience of technology, privacy, and COVID-19 crisis response in Australia, Singapore, Mainland China and Hong Kong. By comparatively exploring the legal frameworks for the COVIDSafe app in Australia, there is the potential to enhance international coordination in digital responses to public health crises.

Early career researchers working on Southeast Asia at the University of Sydney are invited to attend SSEAC’s inaugural residential writing retreat, designed to provide you with the physical and mental space to write as part of a community of like-minded scholars from a broad range of disciplines.

A discussion about the short-lived Pakatan Harapan government and the possible return of kleptocracy in Malaysia