Robert William Hefner, Professor of Anthropology and Associate Director of the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University, will be in residence at NUS as Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Southeast Asia from July-November 2008. Professor Hefner has been Associate Director of the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University, where he has directed the program on Islam and civil society since 1991. Hefner has carried out research on religion and politics in Southeast Asia for the past thirty years, and has authored or edited a fourteen books, as well as several major policy reports for private and public foundations. His most recent books include, Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education (edited with Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Princeton 2007); ed., Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization (Princeton 2005), ed., and Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton 2000). Hefner is also the invited editor for the sixth volume of the forthcoming New Cambridge History of Islam, Muslims and Modernity: Society and Culture since 1800. Hefner is currently writing a book on Islamic education, democratization, and political violence in Indonesia. The research and writing locate the Indonesian example in the culture and politics of the broader Muslim world. His book also revisits the the question of the role of religious and secular knowledge in modernity.
E-mail:fasrwh@nus.edu.sg
Angie Ngoc Tran is Professor at California State University Monterey Bay. She will be in residence at NUS as Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Southeast Asia from August-October 2008. Professor Tran teaches courses in the Social, Behavioral and Global Studies Division on political economy, history of economic thought, and research methodology. After escaping Vietnam as a boat person in 1980, she has sustained her connections with Vietnam by working with researchers, workers, labor unions, journalists, students, Vietnamese and international NGOs in Vietnam. She connects local concerns (in California) with global implications in transnational assembly work of home-workers in the electronic industry in Silicon Valley and garment workers in Vietnam. She actively participates in transnational projects: from Fulbright teaching and research in 1999-2000, to annual fieldwork in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and to being part of a six-country comparative project on the garment commodity chain in Asia Pacific region. Her research and publications focus on migrant workers, labor strikes, labor unions and their media, and issues concerning corporate social responsibility (CSR). Her latest research examines a disconnect between the CSR intention and implementation on the factory floor in Vietnam and the extent to which it provides a false sense of comfort for ethically conscious consumers who buy products from “compliant” factories in Vietnam.
E-mail:fasv10@nus.edu.sg
Mark R. Thompson is professor of political science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. He is resident as Lee Kong Chian NUS Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Southeast Asia at NUS from September-December 2008. A Chicago native, he took his first degree in religious studies at Brown University followed by postgraduate work in England and then in the Philippines. Fascinated by the anti-Marcos struggle, Thompson wrote his dissertation at Yale University on opposition to the highly “sultanistic” Marcos regime in Philippines. After moving to Germany, he witnessed popular uprisings in East Germany and Eastern Europe, inspiring him to work on the conceptualization of “democratic revolutions” in a series of essays later published as a book (Routledge 2004). His current research is also inspired by earlier work on the Philippines. In the Pacific-Asian context, the Philippines seem to have democratized “too early” as a transition occurred before substantial industrialization had been achieved. The regional pattern has been one of “late democratization” in which developmentalist authoritarians argue that democracy must be delayed (at least) until their countries have modernized economically. This study is to be based a series of dyadic comparisons including the one between the Philippines and Thailand discussed in this lecture. In a talk next month, Thompson will offer an overview of this project on political change and economic modernization in East and Southeast Asia (Pacific Asia).
E-mail:fasv4@us.edu.sg
