October 15, 2021
The Friday Morning Seminar on October 15, 2021 features Dr. Seinenu Thein-Lemelson and Burmese colleagues Soe Htun, Sung Chin Par, and Kenneth Wong, who will presenta session titled “Traumatic Presents in Burma: Tracing Silences in the Burmese Democracy Movement and Current Struggle.”
When working in cultural contexts where families have had to cope with political oppression and violence through an intergenerational concealment of their inner lives, it becomes an ethical imperative for researchers to “trace silences” across different realms of lived experience. The goal of this seminar is to identify forms of silences that have existed in the Burmese Democracy Movement and disrupt them. Disrupting these silences and their forms means getting to know individuals in these communities, in all their complexities, including their everyday worlds, their social relationships, moral sentiments, and personal experiences.
Seinenu Myint Thein-Lemelson, PhD is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a senior researcher at the Foundation for Psycho-Cultural Research (FPR).
Soe Htun is a former political prisoner and lifelong democracy activist who was an Executive Member of the 88 Generation Peace and Open Society, Secretary of the National Network for Education Reform (NNER), a leading member of the Federal Democratic Force, and founder of iSchool Myanmar.
Sung Chin Par is an international consultant and graduate student in Sustainable International Development (SID) at Brandeis University. Her husband is currently a prisoner of conscience in Burma.
Kenneth Wong is a lecturer in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
For videos of previous seminars, please contact Sadeq Rahimi.