8 October : Attracting Talent From Abroad: Malaysia’s Experiences

Abstract:
Attracting skilled people in science, technology and innovation (STI) has assumed urgency in today’s increasingly knowledge-intensive economy. Without competent people, the innovation process is severely constrained. Additionally, shortages of talented professionals can undermine the provision of essential social services. Countries, particularly the rich nations, have adopted various strategies to entice top talents in STI to their shores. Developing countries are severely handicapped to retain these skilled personnel due to poor incentives and weak scientific infrastructure.

This skewed migration of talented people particularly from the developing world to the advanced economies has, in recent years, generated much concern since such talented people are already in short supply in many of these developing countries. The term brain drain assumed common usage among policy makers of the developing world who argued about this asymmetric distribution of flows of talented people. These views on unidirectional mobility of talented people are slowly being replaced with notions of multiple directional flows of people or brain circulation and brain return following several important developments including globalization. A related issue is the use of diasporas to stimulate economic development in the immigrants’ countries of origin.

This presentation reviews the efforts undertaken by a rapidly industrializing country such as Malaysia in attracting talent from abroad in order to develop and strengthen her scientific and technological capabilities. It is in six parts. The first part provides a brief introduction to the subject on brain drain, brain circulation, diaspora as well as what is meant by talented people. A brief account on the analytical framework detailing the importance of human capital to the economy is addressed next. The third part describes the past programmes adopted by the Malaysian government to attract talent from abroad. The results of a review exercise to examine the effectiveness of these programmes are presented next. A brief description of the current programme to harness talent is given while the concluding part provides a summary of the key issues. A central theme of this presentation is that talent development, acquisition and retention requires a holistic perspective embracing the key elements of creation of talent; developing a conducive environment for research and innovation; strengthening commitment and coordination; and expanding connectivity and community. (4Cs).

Bio-note:
Dr. K. Thiruchelvam is presently a Visiting Fellow at CAPSTRANS. He is an Associate Professor with the Department of Science and Technology Studies, Faculty of Science, University of Malaya, Malaysia where he lectures on Science, Technology and Innovation Policy; Knowledge Economy; and Technology Transfer. He has been with the Malaysian Civil Service for over 24 years with stints at various Ministries. He was involved in a number of policy studies including the formulation of the Second National Science and Technology Policy. Recently, he led a team of researchers in the preparation of the Malaysian Science and Technology Indicators Report 2006. His research interests include National Innovation Systems; Management of Research Organisations; Management of Technological Capabilities and comparative studies on STI policies. Dr Thiru obtained his PhD in Science and Technology Policy Studies from the University of Sussex. 

10 September : No Medals for Mindanao!  An Update from a Forgotten Warzone

Dr Peter Sales

The Philippines, often described as a social volcano, seems to be going through one of its all-too-frequent eruptions.  Turmoil persists.  The great expectations that followed the overthrow of the Conjugal Dictatorship have long since turned to dust.  Dreams became nightmares; hopes were dashed.  Nowadays more people leave than arrive, a dispiriting indictment of dysfunctional governance.  UN Rapporteur for Extrajudicial Killings, Philip Alston, reported very negatively on state terror after his visit in early 2007.  He described the Armed Forces of the Philippines [AFP] as brutal, repressive, and “in a state of denial”.

Once again, too, the current crisis involves Mindanao.  In the south, the struggle of the bangsamoro people has undergone significant changes over recent times.  The political situation has never been more confused and confusing than during the current wave of negotiations between the Philippine government [GRP] and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front [MILF].  The southern Philippines consequently remains one of the most troubled parts of Southeast Asia.  Mindanao was identified after 9/11 as a hotbed of Islamic extremism and singled out by Washington for special attention in its Global War on Terror [GWOT].  Nonetheless, a precarious ceasefire has prevailed and GRP-MILF peace talks were actually edging towards an agreement over the prickly issue of Ancestral Domain (which translates into Australian fairly accurately as Native Title).  So why has fighting now broken out across the island?

The more complicated the situation, the more the enemies of a just and equitable settlement can manipulate events to their own advantage.  There appears to have been a deliberate attempt to hide the massive military campaign behind the publicity generated by the Beijing Olympic Games.  My presentation seeks to make sense of what is at stake in the southern Philippines by providing an update and a critical assessment of the near-genocidal policies being employed by the Arroyo regime with the active support of its Western sponsors, including Australia.

Bio-note:
Peter Sales taught at University of Wollongong for many years and is presently an Honorary Fellow in the Faculty of Arts.  His research interests include regional issues as well as insurgency and counter-insurgency.  He now lives in the southern Philippines and regards his inclusion on the hit list of the Davao Death Squad as evidence that he is doing something right!  He has published widely on recent Philippine developments and Human Rights concerns in general.

13 August : Kissing is a Symbol of Democracy!
U.S. Popular Culture and the Emergence of the "New Couple" in Occupied Japan

Dr Mark McLelland

Abstract
Japan's defeat at the end of its fifteen years' war in 1945 saw widespread changes to the family and gender system. Women were given political rights for the first time and were recognized as independent agents at work, in the home and in their romantic relationships. Whereas war-time ideology had brought about the "death of romance" in popular culture, with the relaxation of censorship at the war's end, there was a sudden proliferation in discussion about the qualities of the 'new' or 'modern' couple and the popular press saw the rise of a range of 'experts' offering advice on the proper conduct of romance between the sexes. Rather than censor this new discourse of love and sex, in an attempt to encourage Japanese men to be more chivalrous toward women, the Occupation authorities required film-makers to develop romantic story lines (featuring hand-holding, kissing and 'dating' couples) and Hollywood movies themselves were promoted as scripts for the conduct of heterosexual romance. This presentation looks at the impact of the Occupation on Japanese ideas about heterosexual romance and relationships through an analysis of the popular culture texts published in Japan between 1946 and 1952 that are housed in the Prange Collection.

Bio-note
Mark McLelland lectures in Sociology at the University of Wollongong and was the 2007-08 Toyota Visiting Professor of Japanese at the University of Michigan. He is best known for his work in Japanese sexual minority history and is the author of Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan (Routledge-Curzon,
2000) and Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005) and co-editor of Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan (Routledge, 2005), Queer Voices from Japan (Lexington 2007) and AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in the Asia-Pacific Region (University of Illinois Press, 2008). His current book project looks at the development of new styles of Japanese heterosexual romance and coupledom in the wake of the U.S. Occupation.

30 July : Playboy Indonesia and the Media : Commerce and the Islamic Public Sphere on Trial in Indonesia

Professor Philip Kitley

Abstract
This presentation is concerned with one specific matter and other, more general and challenging issues. My specific focus is on the 2006 trial of Playboy Indonesia, a publication that is part of the international Playboy franchise. I examine the complaint before the South Jakarta District Court and the evidence that was presented by the prosecutor and the comments made by various expert witnesses. I move quickly through the problems with pornography in the media to consideration of the transformation of the symbolic and moral character of the urban landscape under capitalism, and new media services and products. In brief, I argue that for some groups, reformasi (political reform) and globalisation have constructed a public sphere that is morally offensive and raises issues of proper performance. The prosecution of the magazine signified concerns with the global spread of commercial media products and the circulation of sexual imagery derived from other places, histories and norms. It was also about frustrated political ambitions and the interest some conservative Islamist groups had in reinstating the Jakarta Charter and establishing the rule of Sharia law. What is worth discussing is the question whether the trial represents a political tactic by marginalised Islamist interests, or is part of a growing, worldwide concern about the character and content of the visual and cyber-spheres.

I will outline the argument in about 20 minutes, and then my colleague, Dr Nadir Hosen, from the Faculty of Law, will lead off our discussion. Nadir is an expert on Sharia law and will bring that expertise and his own insider knowledge to our discussions.

Bio-note
Professor Philip Kitley is Chair of Communication  and former Head, School of Social Science, Media and Communication at the University of Wollongong, and Research Affiliate of the Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies (CAPSTRANS). He is a specialist on the Indonesian electronic media and the author of Television, Nation and Culture in Indonesia (Ohio University Press 2000) and Television, Regulation and Civil Society in Asia (Routledge 2003). From 1986-89, Philip Kitley served as Cultural Attache, Australian Embassy Jakarta. His current research funded by the Australian Research Council is on discourses of publicness in Indonesia.

23 July : Presenting a fractured reality – how Australian and Indonesian media reported conflict in Indonesia

Ari Poespodihardjo

Abstract
Australia – Indonesia relationship for those who are familiar with it, is at best could be described as very complex. Despite the close geographical proximity, Australia and Indonesia are like two different worlds with different history, culture and politics. There is no better example seeing the differences other than seeing how the media in both countries can have opposite views in viewing similar events

Events reflected in the media are not a real representation of ‘reality’. Instead the media presented their own ‘version of reality’ based on what they believed is best serving the need and level of understanding of their audiences. In turn, this the media presentation of ‘reality’ turns into a distortion of reality.
My paper here, based on my PhD Thesis, inspired by my personal experience as professional journalist in Indonesia, is exploring the ways Australian and Indonesian newspapers presents their views in viewing a similar events. In particular, I am exploring on how the newspapers are actually portraying a fractured views of each societies.

Bio note
Ari Poespodihardjo is a former journalist/photojournalist in Indonesia who have covered various issues in Indonesia ranging from pop culture to the 'revolution' in 1998/1999. He is now a full time lecturer and also appointed as Head of the Research Centre at the STIKOM London School of Public Relations in Jakarta.

9 July : “Terror, Law, and the Colonial State”

Professor Ranabir Samaddar

Abstract
In this exploration into the close relation between terror and law as it obtained in India's colonial past, Ranabir Samaddar will attempt to show first, that the relation between terror and law is not a simple question of relating violence to law, but to the very process of constitution making. Second, laws relating to terror may or may not find a formal place in the constitution, but this relation is essential to the working of the basic law, of the foundational concept of the rule of law. Third, intelligence gathering occupies a key place in this relation, and this activity, which has no mention in the constitution almost anywhere in the world, is the fulcrum on which reasons of state stand. Fourth, intelligence is the close monitoring of human movement, of the body, of the physical activities, and in this physical form of politics we have the meeting of the body and reasoning, terror and constitution, violence and law. The specifically Indian experience recounted in the present context may have larger significance in terms of retrieving the history of constitution making.

Bio note
Prof. Ranabir SAMADDAR, a founder of the Calcutta Research Group and its journal, Refugee Watch, was earlier a professor of South Asia Studies, and subsequently the founder-Director of the Peace Studies Programme at the South Asia Forum for Human Rights, Kathmandu. He is visiting Australia as the Distinguished South Asia Lecturer, sponsored by the Australia-India Council and SASA. His recently published study of dialogues as part of war and peace politics, titled The Politics of Dialogue (Ashgate, 2004) is a product of his four-year research on war and peace in South Asia. Before that he had completed a three-volume study of Indian nationalism, the final one titled as, A Biography of the Indian Nation, 1947-1997 (2001). Besides being the editor of three well-known volumes on issues of identity and rights in contemporary politics, Refugees and the State (2003), Space, Territory, and the State (2002), and Reflections on Partition in the East (1997), he is also the editor-in-chief of the South Asian Peace Studies Series. He is currently working on themes related to the materiality of politics.

25th June : Newcomers & the ‘Locally Established’: Indian overseas student and the local Indian community in Melbourne, Australia.

Dr Michael Baas

Abstract
As statistics show, the propensity of Indian overseas students in Australia applying for permanent residency (PR, in short) after graduation is very high; nearly three quarters are expected to do so. As the number of Indian overseas students is increasing considerably so does the number of permanently settled Indians in Australia. It is on the ambivalent relationship between Indian overseas students and the locally established Indian community that I wish to focus in this presentation. Central to my analysis will be the role the local Indian community plays in the lives of Indian overseas students; how they see and interact with each other as well as how they profit from each other. It will be argued that Indian students are seen to be a threat to the image the Indian community has of itself; an image which they also ‘imagine’ (white/Anglo-Saxon) Australians to have of them. Although Indian students generally come to Australia to undertake their Masters’ degrees, the fact that the majority enrol at lower ranking ‘cheap’ universities makes them ‘suspect’ in the eyes of the community. The jobs they seem to find after graduation (taxi driving, waiting tables) further threatens the image the community has of itself. In order to analyze this further I will make use of anthropological literature on the Indian diaspora as well as the way success and failure have been conceptualized in the literature on migration and transnationalism.

Bio-note
Michiel Baas obtained his BA degree in International Management in 1998, and studied Cultural Anthropology & Non-Western Sociology from 2000-2003. He did research among the IT professionals of Bangalore (India) for his MA thesis and graduated (cum laude) in December 2003. In March 2004 he joined the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research (University of Amsterdam) as a PhD student. His project is entitled: “Flexible Transnationalism - Displaced Indian Overseas Students In Between Legality and Illegality in India and Australia. If all goes well his dissertation will be submitted in July, 2008. He is also currently the branch office coordinator of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Amsterdam.

28 May : Spectres of Sentimentality: Bollywood Cinema

Professor Vijay Mishra

Abstract
Bollywood, the name given to popular Indian cinema produced in Bombay (Mumbai), is one of the great cultural products of modern India. Its influence has been pervasive because Bollywood is more than just cinema – it is a fad, a style, a way of negotiating modernity and a conduit through which the Indian diaspora  negotiates its increasingly problematic relationship with the homeland. This paper, based on the recently published essay ‘Re-mapping Bollywood Cinema: A Postcolonial Case-Study’ and another, currently in its  first draft (‘spectres of sentimentality’), is  meant for beginners as well as for advanced scholars in the field. It aims to lay down key features of Bollywood cinema as well as touch upon a central crux of this cinema: the continuing power of melodramatic sentimentality.  The latter theme will be explored  with reference to two recent films, Eklavya (the intertext here is an episode from the massive Indian epic the Mahābhārata) and  Saawariya (a film based on Dostoevsky’s short story ‘White Nights’).

Bio-note
Vijay Mishra is Professor of English Literature at Murdoch University. He holds doctorates from the Australian National University and from Oxford University.  Among his publications are: Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (with Bob Hodge) (Allen and Unwin, 1991), The Gothic Sublime (State University of New York Press, 1994), Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime (SUNY, 1998),  Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (Routledge, 2002) and The  Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (Routledge, 2007).  He is currently completing an ARC-funded project ‘Rushdie Annotated’. He plays the Indian harmonium, is a Beatles fan, and reads Sanskrit.

14 May : In the Shadow of Singapore:
The Limits of Transnationalism in the Riau Borderlands

Associate Professor Lenore Lyons and Dr Michele Ford

Abstract
The Riau Islands of Indonesia, which lie along the border with Singapore, are an important case study for the analysis of cross-border interaction in Southeast Asia. The association of citizenship and nationality with territory has always been tenuous in the region, but during the last two decades a number of state-led initiatives have further challenged this relationship. At the same time that Singapore’s sphere of influence has spread (i.e. its economic borders have ‘grown’) with the implementation of first a growth triangle and then a special economic zone, Riau islanders have simultaneously been engaged in marking out the boundaries of their new provincial territory. Having opposed Mainland Riau’s transitory separatist movement, they successfully broke away from mainland Riau (centred around the city of Pekanbaru in Sumatra) and proclaimed a separate province of Kepri in September 2002. Notions of citizenship and nationality are further complicated by the presence in the islands of significant numbers of transnational subjects. These consist of commuters who travel regularly across the Singapore-Riau border to work; tourists, including Singaporeans who visit Batam every month for sex; and migrant workers, including so-called ‘illegal’ transmigrants and overseas migrant workers who transit in Riau on their way elsewhere. In this paper we examine how understandings of national identity and the ‘nation’ are constructed and negotiated by individuals who live and work on the Riau islands of Batam, Bintan and Karimun. Our interest is in the ways in which those who live within the border zone, as well as those who cross the border for work and/or pleasure, engage in the dual processes of reconstructing the boundaries of the nation-state and establishing their own sense of national identity and belonging.

Bio-notes

Lenore Lyons is Director of the Australian Research Council Key Centre for Asia-Pacific Social Transformation Studies (CAPSTRANS) and Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Media, and Communications at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She is recognised as the leading scholar on the feminist movement in Singapore. Her book on this research, A State of Ambivalence: The Feminist Movement in Singapore, was published by Brill Academic Publishers, Leiden in 2004. She is currently working on two Australian Research Council funded projects – one examines migrant worker activism in support of female domestic workers in Malaysia and Singapore; and the other on skilled migrant women in Australia.

Michele Ford chairs the Department of Indonesian Studies at the University of Sydney, where she coordinates and contributes to the Indonesian language program and teaches about social activism and human rights in the Southeast Asian region. Her research is focused on the Indonesian labour movement, labour migration, and transnationalism. She is currently working on an Australian Research Council funded project that examines union-NGO collaboration on migrant labour issues in five Asian destination countries. Michele has published widely on labour activism and labour migration, and on the Indonesian province of Kepuluan Riau. She is co-editor of Women and Work in Indonesia (with Lyn Parker) and Women and Labour Organizing in Asia: Diversity, Autonomy and Activism (with Kaye Broadbent), both published by Routledge.

Lenore and Michele have recently completed a three year ARC Discovery project on citizenship, sovereignty and identity in the Riau Islands borderlands between Singapore and Indonesia.

30 April : Intellectual Containment: Students and Politics in Postcolonial Southeast Asia

Dr Meredith Weiss

Abstract
Postcolonial, developmental states recognize the need for higher education to generate both ideas and skilled human resources. Many seek too, though, a level of state control incompatible with ideals of academic freedom. This dilemma is all the more keen for semi-democratic states such as Malaysia or Singapore, which can neither curb protest so coercively as more authoritarian neighbours nor accept such free-wheeling criticism as more politically liberal ones. Presumed morally "pure" and entitled to speak, students across Southeast Asia are heir to a tradition of political engagement, based largely on their identity as students. Despite crackdowns, students have been central to political change across the region. They remain so in much of Asia—but not, for instance, in Malaysia. The muting of student protest there may be traced in large part to a post-1969 process of intellectual containment, or normative de-legitimation and historical erasure of student activism, with far-reaching implications.

Bio-note
Meredith L. Weiss is a Research Fellow at the East-West Centre in Washington. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale, and has taught previously at DePaul, Georgetown, and Yale. A specialist in Southeast Asian politics, she is the author of Protest and Possibilities: Civil Society and Coalitions for Political Change in Malaysia (Stanford, Nov. 2005) and co-editor (with Saliha Hassan) of Social Movements in Malaysia: From Moral Communities to NGOs (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). Forthcoming are Crucible, Mirror, Sideshow? Universities and Students in Postcolonial Malaysia and a co-edited volume on political violence in South and Southeast Asia. Weiss's articles have appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Democratization, New Political Science, Journal of East Asian Studies, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, Asian Survey, Contemporary Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, in addition to chapters in numerous anthologies. Her primary foci are civil society and social movements, nationalism and ethnicity, gender, Islamist activism, and electoral politics in maritime Southeast Asia. Weiss is a member of the Southeast Asia Council and chair-elect of the Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei Study Group of the Association of Asian Studies, and serves as Treasurer of the New Political Science section of the American Political Science Association.

16 April : Asian in the Pacific Islands: Replacing the West

Professor Ron Crocombe

Abstract
It is nearly 500 years since the Spanish entered the Pacific Islands.  Ever since, the overwhelming source of external influences on the Islands has been Western Europe or extensions of it (mainly USA, Australia and New Zealand).  We are now going through a paradigm shift - the main external influences will from now on be mainly from Asia.  This transition is already far advanced in some areas of activity, still minor in others, but the process is the same in all - i.e. a reduction of Western influence and an increase in Asian.

The talk will outline the main trends so far, and the indicators of likely future trends, in trade, investment, aid (and the leverage it aims to buy, whoever supplies it), services (e.g. merchandising and retailing, construction, shipping etc), flows of people (whether as settlers, tourists, workers, volunteers, missionaries, business people etc), crime, regionalism (South Pacific regionalism has already been eclipsed by Asia-Pacific regionalism), religion and philosophy (at an early stage of transition), education and media (some substantial shifts in the past year),  sport and culture and other aspects of life.  Diplomats from Asian nations now outnumber those from Western, and several Asian nations now play an active role in military and strategic issues (including training of Pacific Islands disciplined services, supply of materials to Pacific Islands armies etc).  Degrees of congruence and dissonance between key patterns of values that are relevant to Asian, Western and Pacific actors in the drama will be discussed. 

Bio-note
Ron Crocombe is a Professor Emeritus of the University of the South Pacific. During the 1950s he worked in the Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga and New Caledonia in various roles, including government work and university research.  In the 1960s he was Director of the New Guinea Research Unit (since renamed as the PNG National Research Institute).  Through the 1970s and 1980s he was founding Professor of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacific and founding Director of the Institute of Pacific Studies.  In the 1990s and 2000s he has been involved in work for the University of the South Pacific and other universities and international organizations.  He has been a visiting professor in a number of countries and has published widely.  His latest book is "ASIA IN THE PACIFIC ISLANDS: REPLACING THE WEST".  He lives in Rarotonga, Cook Islands. 

19 March : Activating Frontier Livelihoods: Women and the Transnational Secondhand Clothing Trade between Hong Kong and the Philippines

Dr Lynne Milgram

Abstract
This paper explores the work of Filipina entrepreneurs in Baguio City who have developed a branch of the global trade in secondhand clothing between Hong Kong and the Philippines. Building on kinship networks of women working in Hong Kong, these entrepreneurs navigate formal government and informal economic and cultural channels to operationalise a transnational trade that straddles legal-illegal practice in both locales. In so doing, traders connect institutions and parts of societies not previously linked or connect these in different ways, capturing contested markets and fashioning new spaces of consumption.

In this paper I argue that Filipina entrepreneurs’ transnational activism in the Hong-Kong-Philippine used clothing trade reconfigures the market to unsettle essentialist categories of economy, class, value and legality. By crafting global, feminized circuits of commodities and using multiply migrant communities these traders engender global transactions as female as well as male. Simultaneously, state and cultural constraints on their new-found flexibility, means that traders must also negotiate innovative tactics to enable their frontier livelihoods. Women’s work in this trade thus situates local initiatives within wider negotiations of meaning and agency and challenges the common exclusion of actions on the edge from analyses of destabilizing political and global forces.

30 January : Malaysia: The State and Islam: A Property Rights Perspective

Dr Koushik Ghosh

Abstract
The Malaysian state in responding to Islam, as a cultural-political model, presented in particular by PAS (and other Islamists) to deal with the discontents of the modern secular state, has been practicing preemption. This practice, which is clearly reactive, will very likely pit the modern secular state against the alternative of the Islamic state. Since the equilibrium will only be achieved through negotiation of these two alternatives, the balance these two systems can strike will determine the nature of Malaysian socio-political-cultural space for time to come. This paper explores how such equilibrium may be contingent on democracy. It also analyses the dangers posed by state promotion of singular ethnic identities through the use of property rights, and what that implies for Malaysia’s future.

Bio- note
Professor Ghosh is an economist who is deeply interested in the area of social choice theory. He co-chairs the department of economics at Central Washington University and pursues an active research agenda in the areas of globalization and inequality. He is an associate fellow of the East-West center in Honolulu, Hawaii, and was a recent recipient of the Fulbright-Hays scholarship for field studies in Malaysia-Singapore and Brunei.