Research Strength:

“Social Transformation in Southeast Asia”

Formed in May 2008, the School of Arts and Social Sciences (SASS) is home to a dynamic set of research intensive scholars. The academic and disciplinary expertise of the staff is wide-ranging, covering diverse areas in the humanities and social sciences. While working primarily in the geographical locality of Malaysia, staff members also extend their research interests to the neighbouring countries of Southeast Asia, and in some cases beyond this region to track the movement of peoples, artifacts and ideas.

Currently, the research areas of staff members can be grouped into the following three clusters:

· Politics and governance in Southeast Asia

· Culture, religion and gender in Southeast Asia

· Media, literature and the arts in Southeast Asia

Through our multi-disciplinary research and community engagement, we critically interrogate the world around us through texts, both generated and extant, towards re-iterating and re-claiming the agency of the disenfranchised and citizenry at large, and affording a new aesthetics and transformative praxis in Southeast Asia.

Our research is informed by an engaged ethos as evidenced by our interrogation of cutting-edge topics that include: electoral reform, ethnic politics, representations of the marginalized, moral policing, queer sexualities, religion and civil society, governmentality and the city, local democracies, and the regional manifestations of globalization.

Innovations in engaging with and theorizing beyond ‘Western’ thought and philosophies are demonstrated by the staff's current range of research activities: from promoting a multicultural Gothic aesthetics in the reading of postmodern and Asian literatures (including postcolonial and Asian American texts), delineating the politics and poetics of New Cinema (with an emphasis on independent films), transnational media formations, critical visual ethnographies, and the construction of new subjectivities through cyber-mediations and post-human representations.

In so doing, we offer a transformative praxis and political platform for change that calls for a democratization of discourses and practices within the local and global contexts that we inhabit.

Research Strength Members: