SEAC hosted a roundtable discussion, in collaboration with the LSE South Asia Centre, to reflect on the current situation in Myanmar and its future, listening to the voices from Myanmar.
In the ten months since Myanmar’s military instigated yet another coup d’état, multiple institutions have organised panels to assess the situation and project the future. This roundtable invited speakers from Myanmar to share their grassroots and situated analyses with questions such as: What are the main concerns? What is behind the current crisis? And how do they want to shape the future of Myanmar?
Biographies of Participants
Nyi Nyi Kyaw is a fellow at Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen (KWI)/Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen, Germany. His areas of interest are law and social movements, religion, nationalism, constitutionalism, and human rights in Myanmar. Kyaw's research has been published in the Review of Faith & International Affairs, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, and Buddhism, Law & Society as well as in several edited volumes on Islam, citizenship, media, and Buddhist-Muslim encounters in South and Southeast Asia.
Tayzar San is a Burmese physician, politician, and pro-democracy activist. He is a leading figure in the Spring Revolution in Myanmar. After graduating from the University of Medicine Mandalay, he worked as a librarian and NGO worker with a focus on public health and political education. In 2010, he founded the Beautiful Mind Foundation, which provides free health care services to the poor, and became the executive director of the Yone Kyi Yar Knowledge Propagation Society, a local research and parliamentary monitoring group.
Ja Htoi Pan Maran is the Deputy Minister of Education, National Unity Government of Myanmar. She previously served as the Director of Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences- Mai Ja Yang and Associate Director at Kachinland Research Centre and has been involved in numerous education projects in conflict setting in Kachin State in the past decade. She is also a social researcher and her work is published in international peer-reviewed journals such as “Development and Change” and “International Journal of Drugs Policy.” Her work focuses on youth, drugs, education and contemporary social anthropology of Kachin society. She obtained an M.A (Anthropology) degree from Northern Illinois University and has also received postgraduate and research training from London School of Economics.
Dr. Jayde Roberts is a senior lecturer in the School of Built Environment at UNSW Sydney and an interdisciplinary scholar of Urban Studies and Southeast Asian Studies. Her research in Myanmar focuses on urban informality, heritage-making, and the effects of transnational networks. During her 2016-2018 Fulbright US Scholar term, she worked with Myanmar’s universities and municipal departments to investigate discourses of urban development in Yangon. Her book, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese, was published by University of Washington Press in 2016.
Prof. Hyun Bang Shin (@urbancommune) is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of speculative urbanisation, gentrification and displacement, urban spectacles, and urbanism with particular attention to Asian cities. His books include Planetary Gentrification (Polity, 2016), Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience (Routledge, 2021), and The Political Economy of Mega Projects in Asia: Globalization and Urban Transformation (Routledge, forthcoming). He is Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation.