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The Bureaucratisation of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia

In this talk, Dominik Müller will present the conceptual framework of a newly established collaborative research project studying “The Bureaucratisation of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia”. It investigates contemporary dynamics of Islamic bureaucratisation with an analytic focus on the state’s exercise of classificatory power and its workings on the micro-level. The project views the bureaucratisation of Islam in Southeast Asia not just as an empirical fact to be examined in singular national contexts, but aims at theorising its underlying patterns from a comparative perspective.

The Karen and the Gift of Education

Focusing on the Karen people in Burma, Thailand and the United Kingdom, Learning, Migration and Intergenerational Relations: The Karen and the Gift of Education analyses how global, regional and local developments affect patterns of learning. It combines historical and ethnographic research to explore the mutual shaping of intergenerational relations and children’s practical and formal learning within a context of migration and socio-political change. In this endeavour, Pia Jolliffe discusses traditional patterns of socio-cultural learning within Karen communities as well as the role of Christian missionaries in introducing schooling to the Karen in Burma and in Thailand. This is followed by an analysis of children’s migration for education in northern Thailand where state schools often encourage students’ aspirations towards upward social mobility at the same time as schools reproduce social inequality between the rural Karen and urban Thai society. The author draws attention to international humanitarian agencies who deliver education to refugees and migrants at the Thai-Burma border, as well as the role of UK government schools in the process of resettling Karen refugees. In this way, the book analyses the connections between learning, migration and intergenerational relations in households, schools and other institutions at the local, regional and global level.

Burma: When Women lead the Way to Peace, Freedom and Democracy

After fifty years of isolation under the rule of an oppressive military regime, Myanmar is finally opening up in a wave of euphoria. Despite the recent landslide victory of the National League for Democracy in the country’s first free election, the situation remains explosive.
Fighting between the Burmese military and armed ethnic groups continues, hate speech is spreading on social networks and unbearable human tragedies are tearing the country apart Inspired by Aung San Suu Kyi, a number of women activists from different walks of life have united to profoundly transform their society and to build sustainable peace as the country takes its first steps on an arduous and fragile path to democracy. A number of men support them on their long march to freedom.
During several long immersive stays from Rangoon to Central Burma, from East to West and South to North, Sylvie Brieu set out to gain some insights into the reality of Myanmar today through the incisive visions and the positive actions of these change-makers whose voices are underrepresented in the international media landscape.
Who are they? What are their challenges, their fears, their hopes? How can their compelling stories be shared?
Her talk will also address the ethical dilemmas of journalists working in Myanmar today.

Contesting the Liberal Order? China Rising in a World Not of Its Own Making

Yongjin Zhang will investigate the entanglement of the rising Chinese power with the liberal global order in negotiating for normative change. As an emerging power with an authoritarian regime, China faces a liberal global governance order and hierarchical constructs. Professor Zhang will argue that three differentiated strategic approaches have been developed by China in this entanglement: to defend liberal pluralism in the legalized hegemony; to contest liberal cosmopolitan anti‐pluralism in the changing normative order; and to endorse state‐centric solidarism with regard to the construction of a liberal global governance order. If they reflect a rising China’s preferences of order construction, they also constitute an important part of China’s engaging negotiations for normative change in international society.

Boltanski and Esquerre on The Enrichment Economy

In their lecture, the eminent sociologists Luc Boltanski (author of the The New Spirit of Capitalism and On Justification, Economies of Worth) and Arnaud Esquerre (author of La manipulation mentale: Sociologie des sectes en France) will present their forthcoming book, which explores what they see as a new ‘enrichment’ form of capitalism, and its close associations with the luxury sector, heritage and collectible objects.

They will also be leading a seminar on the issues raised in their lecture in the TORCH seminar room, top floor, Radcliffe Humanities Building, Woodstock Road, on Friday 18 November at 10 am.

Appadurai on Failure, Design and the Globalisation of Risk

In his lecture, Professor Appadurai, eminent anthropologist and writer on globalisation and modernity, develops his recent work on the culture of modern finance and related technologies of big data and asymmetric speculation. He will explore the implications of an emerging technological world in which failure and convenience have become the hallmarks of new tools, applications and devices. What does this development mean for such ideas as fashion, innovation and sovereignty?

Professor Appadurai will also be leading a seminar on the general topic of failure, to take place on Friday 14th October, 10 a.m., in the top floor Seminar Room of the Oxford Humanities Research Centre, Woodstock Road.

Arjun Appadurai is the Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, where he is also Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge. He has authored numerous books and scholarly articles, including Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Duke 2006) and Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (Minnesota 1996; Oxford India 1997). His latest book is Banking on Words. The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (Chicago, 2015).

This lecture will open a new series organized by the TORCH network, ‘Rethinking the Contemporary: The World since the Cold War’, which will host leading scholars, intellectuals and cultural practitioners who have been involved in developing new ways of understanding the world since the 1990s. This term’s theme will be markets and the economy, and the next event will take place on Thursday of 6th week (17 November) at 5 pm, when the sociologists Luc Boltanski (EHESS, Paris) and Arnaud Esquerre (CNRS, Paris) will give a lecture entitled ‘The Enrichment Economy: Narratives, Collectibles and Heritage as Economic Resources’.