Organizer: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan
Type/Location: Virtual
Three Rohingya women walking in the IDP camp within Myebon (controlled by the Arakan Army) | Wikimedia Commons
Description:
While the nationalizing of education—in which the very idea of nation is disseminated—makes a certain kind of citizen that the nation requires, in a double gesture of hope and fear, it also produces forms of exclusion. The desire to be included in the very thing that excludes creates ‘internal exiles’ with lost identities—individuals who are ‘a stranger to one’s own country, language, sex and identity.’ In the case of Burma, the education system fashions the desired type of citizen, specifically the Burmese-speaking, Buddhist Burman. At the same time, this process establishes the constituted outside as Others (non-Burman or non-Buddhist). However, in the aftermath of the 2021 coup, a distinctive educational space arose, enabling its participants to imagine new forms of social belonging.
Drawing from Homi Bhabha’s two distinct forms of nation—the pedagogic and the performative—this presentation explores how the nation’s people are made in a double narration: one as the objects of nationalist pedagogy in the fixed discou
About the Speaker:
Ei Thin Zar is the 2025–26 Gosling-Lim Postdoctoral Fellow at the Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development, Chiang Mai University. Ei earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction. Her dissertation investigates the consequences of exclusionary ethnic nationalism by examining historical and contemporary approaches to language in Burma’s educational practices. Her post-dissertation project examines the formation of collective knowledge and educated subjects, focusing on the effects of transmissible memories from historical and contemporary social movements as they relate to the education of stateless youth along the Thailand–Burma border. Since the February 1,2021 military coup in Myanmar, she has been active in supporting Burmese youth through the creation of People’s Radio Myanmar and Yone-Htwat-Soh-Mon, two nonprofit organizations.
Registration:
To attend the event virtually, please register here.