Call for Papers for 2021 conference: People, Power, Politics, Pandemics and Other Perils in Southeast Asia

Call for Papers for 2021 conference: People, Power, Politics, Pandemics and Other Perils in Southeast Asia. The event will take place on 21-24 October 2021 at University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada. Deadline: Thursday 8 April 2021. Submit from the link below.

Please submit your proposal(s) on or before Thursday, 8 April 2021 here.  

The COVID-19 outbreak has disrupted many facets of our daily lives. It has also amplified the need for Southeast Asian researchers, scholars, practitioners and artists working in various fields to share new learnings, lessons, dilemmas and dreams, inspired by current crises our world and humanity face today.

Much of what is happening in the Southeast Asian region and the wider world today with the COVID-19 pandemic is deeply connected with the kinds of issues and concerns that CCSEAS scholars have long engaged with since its creation. They have fine-tuned mainstream disciplinary studies by linking their analyses to broader challenges, including pandemics, disasters, urban insurrections, rural insurgencies, social cleavages, economic dislocations, regime transitions, and intergenerational conflicts. They have connected urban, peri-urban and rural development concerns with roles of states, non-government and international financial agencies, and governance at various scales, magnified by resource constraints, legitimation crises, ecological stresses, and political emergencies.

We invite all scholars interested in the Southeast Asian region and its growing diaspora worldwide to submit paper, panel, roundtable, video art/screen work and poster proposals to CCSEAS 2021, which we hope will be among our first “live” conference in the post-pandemic period.

We are particularly interested in submissions rethinking Southeast Asian political economy and location in disrupted neoliberal globalization in relation to discourses on human rights, liberalism, good governance, and democracy, whose futures and prospects in Southeast Asian region, and elsewhere, have been complicated by the still-spreading global pandemic. 

Papers and panels may include but not limited to:

  • State, security and surveillance in exceptional times
  • Pandemic preparation, management and recovery
  • Inequality and injustice during the pandemic
  • Pandemic scapegoats and sacrificial lambs
  • Gendered dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic
  • Post-pandemic survival and scenarios
  • Contemporary Southeast Asia and East Asia relations
  • Rethinking Empires: US, China, Japan and Southeast Asia
  • Canada-Southeast Asian political and economic cooperation
  • Changing ASEAN: Responses during COVID-19
  • Agriculture, climate change and biodiversity
  • Art, nature, culture and community
  • Mobility, migration and livelihoods
  • Human rights and democracy: Perils, trajectories and prospects
  • Tensions, threats and terror
  • Violence, financial insecurity, tensions, fear within home and other spaces
  • Food and water (in)security
  • Climate and environmental (in)justice
  • Public health systems: From reform to radical proposals
  • Reproductive and other health care services
  • Gender, race, class and sexuality in changing SEA
  • Mobile bodies, precarious livelihoods and perilous spaces
  • “Essential workers” and services in everyday existence
  • Class, ethnicity and gender dynamics of work, agency and well-being

Please submit your proposal(s) on or before Thursday, 8 April 2021 here.  

From 21 Oct 2021
Until 24 Oct 2021
University of British Columbia (UBC)
Academic discipline: