HU Southeast Asian Societies and Cultures Lecture Series Summer Semester 2025 Archive
Archive
July 7th
Timothy Williams (Bundeswehr Universität München):
“‘The ghost of communism is alive and well.’ Consolidating power through memory.”
Abstract:
In this talk, Timothy Williams explores how the memory of violent pasts are used in post-violence societies to generate political power and legitimacy in the present. In particular, he argues that the core element of memory for power and legitimacy is how individual roles and responsibility are attributed regarding the violent past: who is remembered as a perpetrator, who assigned the role of victim, who is celebrated as a hero? How these roles are attributed and any ambivalences that surround this process is key to how the past is remembered and how it unfolds an impact today. These processes become visible in the memoryscape as a materially and socially constituted space in which various collective and individual memories coexist, compete and coalesce to render the past significant in the present. The memoryscape is constituted by a vast array of material sites and objects, embodied practices, narratives and discourses and cultural heritage that interact with each other in creating meaning of the past. Draw on in-depth fieldwork in Cambodia (memory of the Khmer Rouge genocide from 1975-1979) and Indonesia (memory of the genocide against communists in 1965/1966), Timothy introduces and discusses the concepts of mnemonic role attributions and ambivalences.
Timothy Williams is a Junior Professor of Insecurity and Social Order and Chairman of the interdisciplinary research centre RISK at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich, as well as Vice President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Timothy is the author of the books Memory Politics after Mass Violence. Attributing Roles in the Memoryscape (2025, Bristol UP), The Complexity of Evil. Perpetration and Genocide (2021, Rutgers UP), and co-author of Peace and the Politics of Memory (with Johanna Mannergren, Annika Björkdahl, Susanne Buckley-Zistel and Stefanie Kappler, 2024, Manchester UP).
June 30th
Benjamin Baumann (Universität Heidelberg): "Matrifocality and ancestral cults in Thailand’s lower Northeast"
June 27th, 2PM
Book Launch: “Global Handbook of Inequality” with Surinder Jodhka (Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University)
June 24th, 6PM
Veronika Radulovic
"Sicherheitsabstand. Vietnam. Kunst. Politik. Freundschaften. Eine Annäherung."
Ein Gesprächs/Vortrag von und mit Veronika Radulovic zur Entwicklung der vietnamesischen Kunst vor dem Hintergrund von Đổi mới
June 6th, 3PM
Dr. Tue Trinh (Nationale Universität Hanoi):
Anredeformen im Vietnamesischen
[Forms of address in Vietnamese]
May 27th, 6PM
Andrew Mertha (Johns Hopkins University):
Book Talk – “Bad Lieutenants. The Khmer Rouge, United Front, and Class Struggle, 1970-1997”
May 26th
Paul Christensen (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen):
“Living with Shifting Sands: Social and Spiritual Impacts of Sand Mining in Southeast Asia”
May 19th
Simon Rowedder (Universität Passau):
“Yunnan as Inter-Asian Method – not quite ‘Chinese’, nor quite ‘Southeast Asian’”
May 15th
Sirima Thongsawang (Chulalongkorn University):
“Urban conflict and resolution: Bangkok as the city of Anulom”
April 15th
Book Launch: “Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum: A Multifaceted History of Khmer Rouge Crimes” with Stephanie Benzaquen-Gautier and Ann-Laure Porée.