The Channel: A Podcast from the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)

This episode is guest hosted by Liberty Chee, who is currently a visiting researcher here at the International Institute for Asian Studies. While in Leiden, Liberty is working on a book manuscript that examines recruitment and employment agencies in Southeast Asia, their relations to other state and non-state actors, and how these structure the experiences of domestic migrant workers themselves. F...

Here at IIAS, the upcoming edition of our flagship publication The Newsletter (June 2024, #98) comes out next month, just in time for the ICAS 13 conference in Surabaya, Indonesia. This edition of The Newsletter is meant to engage in various ways with the conference theme, “Crossways of Knowledge.” The special Focus section of this issue presents a collection of articles by authors from the I...

This episode features a conversation about development, state-owned enterprises, and the political economy of resource extractivism, with a special focus on the case of Brazil. Jewellord “Jojo” Nem Singh is an Assistant Professor in International Development at the  International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague , part of Erasmus University Rotterdam. In 2020, Jojo was awarded a...

On this episode of  The Channel,  we’re bringing you a full episode from our friends over at The Chicken-Neck (TCN) Podcast . TCN is Northeast India's first policy-based podcast offering an informed take on culture, language, food, clothes, history, politics, law, policy, and much more. The particular episode we're re-posting features an interview with Aditya Kiran Kakati , who...

CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains discussion of trauma and sexual violence that some listeners may find difficult. On this episode, Kate McGregor joins for a discussion of so-called "comfort women" of Indonesia. McGregor's new book is Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory and Sexual Violence in Indonesia , published in 2023 as part of the Critical Human Rights series at the University of Wisco...

This episode features a conversation about political geology with Adam Bobbette , who serves as a Lecturer in Political Geology at the University of Glasgow. After studying architecture and landscape at the University of Toronto, Adam earned his PhD in geography from Cambridge. His research examines the intersections between politics and environmental and earth sciences, with a special regional fo...

In this episode, Soheb Niazi and Julien Levesque discuss Muslim caste organizations in India. Soheb Niazi is an historian who specializes in the social and economic history of modern India. He is particularly interested in studying the history of non-elite (non- ashrāf ) Muslim actors in South Asia to understand the formation of caste and class relations among them. Soheb is currently a Research F...

As listeners may know, this year marked the 10th edition of the ICAS Book Prize (IBP). The prize was established in 2003 by our flagship conference, the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS), to recognize outstanding publications in the field of Asian Studies. The award brings wider visibility to the latest and most impressive books, and it has become one of the most prestigious book pr...

This bonus episode is guest hosted by Cha-Hsuan Liu, an Affiliated Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies and the editor of the online collection "Global Health Matters" on IIAS' The Blog . To explore the topic of cultural healing and humanistic approaches to health and wellbeing, Cha-Hsuan is joined by four guests: Aditya Kiran Kakati, An-Bang Yu, Marian Markelo, and Fatima Gay M...

This episode features a conversation about poetic traditions in East Africa. Earlier this year, Brill published In This Fragile World: Swahili Poetry of Commitment by Ustadh Mahmoud Mau . Ustadh Mau is a spiritual leader and popular poet from Lamu, Kenya. When he visited the Netherlands in May 2023, a local bookshop in Leiden hosted a reading to launch this new collection of English translations....

On October 13, 2023, the International Institute of Asian Studies celebrates its 30th anniversary, and The Newsletter will be releasing a special issue as part of this celebration. More than just a three-decade retrospective, the issue is meant to reflect on the contemporary state of Asian Studies and the role of institutions like IIAS in the discipline's future. As regular readers will know, ever...

This episode features two colleagues having a discussion about gender in East Asian Religions. The first guest, Jingjing Li, is a University Lecturer in Chinese and Comparative Philosophy at Leiden University. Her primary work examines theories of mind and consciousness across East Asian and Continental traditions, particularly Chinese Wei Shi philosophy and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, re...

This episode features a conversation between Sally Anne Param and Paul Gnanaselvam. Sally, who serves as the guest host, is a sociologist who has conducted research about the Indian community in Malaysia. Paul Gnanaselvam is an Ipoh-born writer and poet whose work often focuses on the experiences, issues, and identity conflicts of those in the Indian diaspora. His latest collection, The Elephant T...

Hedwig Waters is a cultural and economic anthropologist with research interests in topics of debt, wildlife, and moral economic transitions in Mongolia. She currently works as a Horizon Europe ERA Postdoctoral Fellow at Palacky University in the Czech Republic. Earlier this month, her first book – Moral Economic Transitions in the Mongolian Borderlands: A Proportional Share – was published by Univ...

This episode features a conversation hosted by Aarti Kawlra, the Academic Director of the Humanities Across Borders program here at IIAS, in which she speaks with three guests: Daan van Dartel, Curator of Popular Culture and Fashion at the National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands; Lipika Bansal, a researcher, social designer, and the founder of Textiel Factorij in Amsterdam; and, final...

Sanderien Verstappen is Assistant Professor of anthropology at the University of Vienna. In addition to her writing, she is also a filmmaker and the founding director of the Vienna Visual Anthropology Lab . Sanderien’s latest book is New Lives in Anand: Building a Muslim Hub in Western India , published last year by University of Washington Press. In 2002, when widespread anti-Muslim violence brok...

Today on the podcast, we welcome Jia Zhao and Darunee Terdtoontaveedej, both of whom are on the team that organizes the CinemAsia Film Festival. Jia is the Artistic Director for the festival, and Darunee is a Film Programmer for CinemAsia and helps organize special events, particularly focusing on LGBTQ programming. CinemAsia is one of the largest and longest-running Asian film festivals in Europe...

On this episode of  The Channel,  we’re bringing you a full episode from our friends over at the Center for South Asia at Stanford University. SASSpod is hosted by Lalita du Perron and features a regular stream of excellent, in-depth discussions. According to the show’s website, “The podcasts feature a wide range of topics, ranging from poetry to politics, from manuscript collecting...

For our first episode of 2023 ,  we’re bringing you a full episode from our friends over at East Asia for All , a podcast dedicated to all things East Asian pop culture. East Asia for All is hosted by Melissa Brzycki and Stephanie Montgomery, and according to the show’s website, “As pop culture nerds who also have a decade of experience living and traveling in East Asia, they have personally...

On this episode, we welcome four guests to discuss democratic backsliding and rising authoritarianism in Southeast Asia, and also grassroots mobilizations in response to such phenomena. The first iteration of this group came together as a roundtable at the conference of the Canadian Council for Southeast Asian Studies in 2021. The convenor and chair of that roundtable was Nhu Truong. Nhu is A...

Birgit Abels is professor of cultural musicology at the University of Göttingen. She has conducted ethnographic and ethnomusicological research in multiple sites across Asia, and she is the Principal Investoigor on the European Research Council project  Sound Knowledge: Alternative Epistemologies of Music in the Western Pacific Island World .  Today we are talking about Birgit’s new book...

Edwin Pietersma is an historian and anthropologist who specializes in modern and colonial Asian history. Broadly, his research focuses on the concepts of modernity and colonialism in Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand. Edwin is an alumni of a special initiative here at IIAS, the Dual Degree in Critical Heritage Studies of Asia and Europe. This program encourages an interdisciplinary, multi-sited, and cri...

This episode features a conversation with Cecily Cook, former Director of Programs at the Asian Cultural Council in New York. Cecily has had a long career at the intersection of Asia and the arts. Over the course of decades, she has worked in various roles, and at various institutions, in support of the artistic and cultural exchange between different Asian countries and the United States. In addi...

This episode explores the ins and outs of academic book publishing through a conversation with Chunyan Shu. Chunyan received a PhD in Chinese Studies from Leiden University in 2013, and she currently works as an Acquisitions Editor at Brill. Brill was founded in Leiden in 1683, and it has since become a well-known publishing house around the globe, particularly with respect to Asian Studies. The w...

This is the final episode in our four-part mini-series on River Cities as Method (RCM) , a new project under the umbrella of Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA) at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS). The goal of River Cities as Method is to promote ecologically and socially inclusive revitalizations of rivers and the cities/neighborhoods that coexist with them. In this episode, S...