University of Michigan Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Armored fighting spiders. Dimension-hopping refugees. Flying whale sharks. “The Sea is Ours: Tales from Steampunk Southeast Asia” centers Southeast Asian voices using speculative fiction as a lens for colonial history, political critique, and regional imagination.

Edited by Jaymee Goh & Joyce Chng, this anthology proves that the future (and the past) has always belonged to Southeast Asia.

📚 4th Floor, Hatcher South | LOC # PR9570 .S6442 S43 2015

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This week's 🎶 features Mi Noog by Hmong-Canadian band SuddenRush! Enjoy this rock ballad featuring grunge slides.

bit.ly/3QW5oHs

Sudden Rush - Mi Noog Lyrics w/ English Translations Song: Mi Noog © Sudden Rush

The “Cohesion under Crisis” research team, including Professors Cesi Cruz, Allen Hicken, and Dan Slater (University of Michigan), Anil Menon (UC Merced), and Tom Pepinsky (Cornell University), is offering five $18,000 fellowships for graduate students and recent graduates conducting fieldwork in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, or Vietnam.

Fellows will undertake three months of fieldwork on social cohesion and crisis response while contributing to a broader comparative research project funded by The Minerva Research Initiative.

Applications due: June 15, 2026
Apply here: bit.ly/callforfellowship

Looking for Southeast Asian Studies book recommendations? Here's what members of the community are currently reading.

Assistant Professor Alyssa Paredes' is Darcie DeAngelo's "How to Love a Rat: Detecting Bombs in Postwar Cambodia". DeAngelo's book was awarded the 2025 Julian Steward Book Prize from the AAA's subsection for Environment and Anthropology.

"How to Love a Rat" was published in 2024 by University of California Press in 2024.

"How to Love a Rat" takes place in a Cambodian minefield. Working amid hidden bombs, former war combatants use explosive-sniffing rats to clear mines from the land. In total, an estimated four to six million landmines in Cambodia have been left behind by wars that ended decades ago. This has created the conditions for a flourishing mine-clearance industry, where workers who were once enemy combatants may now be employed on the same clearance teams.

Zeroing in on two distinct sets of feelings, Darcie DeAngelo paints a portrait of the love experienced between humans and rats and the suspicions felt between former adversaries turned coworkers. In doing so, she points to how human-animal relationships in the minefield produce models for relationality among people from opposing sides of war. The ways the deminers love the rats mediate both the traumatic violence of the past and the uncertain dangers of the minefield. The book's stories depict an transformative postwar ecology emerging through human-nonhuman relationships, including those shared between humans and rats, landmines, and spirits.

GETSEA Panel | How to Conduct Research in Timor-Leste

Are you planning to conduct research in Timor-Leste for the first time?

Join GETSEA to learn about fieldwork preparation, opportunities, and challenges in conducting research in Timor-Leste, brought together by researchers with diverse backgrounds and firsthand experience in the field.

Speakers:
Ariel Mota Alves (University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa)
Andrew Kline (University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa)
Xueting Wang (Tsinghua University)

Moderated by: Dr. Lia Kent (Victoria University)

Date & Time:
May 20, 2026 | 3pm Hawaiʻi
May 20, 2026 | 6pm West Coast
May 20, 2026 | 9pm East Coast
May 21, 2026 | 10am Timor-Leste

Register for the Zoom webinar here: https://bit.ly/GETSEA-TL

Happy ! 🎶 天黑黑 Cloudy Day by 孙燕姿 Sun Yan-Zi (Singapore)
https://bit.ly/4cNUr3h

孫燕姿 Sun Yan-Zi - 天黑黑 Cloudy Day (official 官方完整版MV) [♬ 孫燕姿經典必聽合輯YouTube歌單]https://SunYanZi.lnk.to/MVTOPHitsLY[♬ 孫燕姿必聽經典TOP25 情歌療癒系MV連播]https://SunYanZi.lnk.to/kCDWdFQoLY[ ♬ 孫燕姿 同名專輯：各大數位音樂平台]https://TWBC.lnk.t...

this week features ໜ້າຮັກ (Pretty) by Unicorn, a Lao slow rock jam from 2003.

"ຕັ້ງແຕ່ວັນນັ້ນທີ່ເຮົາທັງສອງໄດ້ພົບກັນຂ້ອຍກໍ່ເພີ້ຝັນເຖິງເຈົ້າສະເໝີ"

"Since the day we met, I've always dreamed of you"

https://bit.ly/4mZCBO9

poosaolao 18K likes, 1.3K comments. "Lao Music ໜ້າຮັກ - Na-huk- Unicorn"

Assistant Professor Alyssa Paredes published her article, "Plantation Liberalism: A Genealogy of Personhood, Property, and Environmental Litigation between Philippine Mindanao and the Black Atlantic" in the latest issue of Current Anthropology. Attached is the abstract of the article, the full article is open access: https://doi.org/10.1086/739995.

Scholarship on the plantation has been broadly split into two ambits of concern. The first, emerging from the Black Atlantic tradition, has critiqued liberal humanist frameworks and the problematics of personhood in conjunction with histories of plantation slavery. The second, growing out of environmental anthropology and critical agrarian studies largely, but not exclusively, of the Global South, has concentrated on the ecological dynamics of resource control and activism. This essay offers the concept of plantation liberalism to bring these branches into closer political relation using an antichemical campaign on Philippine banana plantations as an ethnographic departure point. Plantation liberalism is the property-oriented vision of personhood introduced by agrarian colonialism that continues to define the contours of environmental activism today. The essay outlines how American planters of the early twentieth century drew on racial ideologies to project limited personhood onto Mindanawon natives and to impose private property as the path toward their “benevolent assimilation.” It then demonstrates how those ideals became the narrative terrain on which activists’ claims for justice are articulated and adjudicated. By illuminating the plantation’s hold on the political imagination, this essay calls for a language of environmental activism beyond the frame of “life, liberty, and property.”

Plantation Liberalism : A Genealogy of Personhood, Property, and Environmental Litigation between Philippine Mindanao and the Black Atlantic | Current Anthropology: Vol 67, No 1 Scholarship on the plantation has been broadly split into two ambits of concern. The first, emerging from the Black Atlantic tradition, has critiqued liberal humanist frameworks and the problematics of personhood in conjunction with histories of plantation slavery. The second, growing out of environ...

Looking for Southeast Asian Studies book recommendations? Here's what members of the community are currently reading. MIRS student Gengrun Li's is Li Zishu (黎紫书)'s "Land of Mundanity (流俗地)."

"Land of Mundanity" is a novel written in Chinese by Malaysian Chinese writer Li Zishu, set in the fictional city of Tin Capital, inspired by her hometown of Ipoh. The novel captures the lives of ordinary working-class Malaysians there, revealing the social history and community change through daily life experiences of various characters, centering on a blind woman named Yinxia (银霞). "Reading this book is very much like watching a documentary film, seeing how social worlds and gendered experiences are portrayed," said Gengrun, who is drawn to the novel's Malaysian Chinese linguistic expressions and its richly observed everyday details.

The book was published by Rye Field Publishing Company in 2020. For an English introduction, check out this essay by Prof. Alison Groppe (University of Oregon): https://archive.ncafroc.org.tw/novel/paper/preview/1x47E6ebz9w4JrGJ2zYO2x