The Regional Social and Cultural Studies (RSCS) programme focuses on a variety of socio-cultural issues including cultural globalisation, civil society and state relations, class and identity formations, religion in politics and everyday life, patterns of mass consumption, and language and national cultures. RSCS welcomes different disciplines from sociology, anthropology, ethnography, contemporary history, gender and cultural studies in order to engage in qualitative research or theory-building.

Projects and Activities

Malaysian Studies Group

The 8 March 2008 Malaysian general elections caught the imaginations of scholars and laypersons alike. RSCS held a series of public seminars in the lead up to the elections as well as post-event seminars to analyse the results. Kicking off the series was Dr Michael Yeoh from the Asian Strategy & Leadership Institute (ASLI) whose talk was titled “ The Upcoming Malaysian Elections – Issues and Projections” on 6 March 2008. Following that, on 14 March 2008 there was a post-mortem by Dr Ooi Kee Beng and Dr Lee Hock Guan from RSCS and Dr Johan Saravanamuttu, all ISEAS researchers, who spoke on the election results and their implications. Broader policy consequences were also discussed by Din Merican, Tawfik Ismail, Khoo Kay Peng and Wong Chin-Huat in the seminar “Malaysia’s NEP: Where to from here?” on 1 April 2008. Finally, RSCS invited Malaysian stakeholders such as Democratic Action Party member and MP for Bukit Bendera, Liew Chin Tong and Malaysian Chinese Association member and deputy chairman of Institute of Strategic Analysis & Policy Research (INSAP) Rita Sim to speak on “Malaysian Politics after March 8” on 23 April 2008, and “Post-election trauma in Malaysia: So who is running the country now?” on 22 May 2008, respectively.

In addition to the seminars, two books on Malaysian politics were published. The first was March 8: Eclipsing May 13 by Dr Ooi Kee Beng, Dr Johan Saravanamuttu and Dr Lee Hock Guan, published by ISEAS in 2008. The second is Arrested Reform: The Undoing of Abdullah Badawi by Dr Ooi Kee Beng, Kuala Lumpur : REFSA, published in 2009.

Singapore Politics and Culture

The follow up to the 1989 landmark volume Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore (edited by Kernial Sandhu and Paul Wheatley) will be due out by end of 2009. The new volume, to be titled Management of Success: Modern Singapore Revisited (edited by Terence Chong) looks at the evolving public policies from across a wide section of areas from politics, economics, law, the environment and society that have defined 21 st century Singapore .

Contemporary Histories

In line with RSCS’s focus on contemporary histories, it collaborated with the Chinese heritage Centre for a seminar on entitled “Malaysian Chinese: Recent Developments and Prospects” on 10 July 2008. The programme also, with the Asia Research Institute, held the “North Kalimantan Communist Party History Dialogue Session” on 6-7 November 2008 to excavate the life narratives of surviving communists in the region.

Religion and Politics

The programme’s strong research interest in the intersection of religion and politics saw it hold two conferences. The first was held on 14-15 August 2008, entitled “Sufi Movements in Contemporary Islam”, in collaboration with the National University of Singapore. The second was “ Religion in Southeast Asian Politics: Resistance, Negotiation and Transcendence”, on 11-12 December 2008, in collaboration with Cornell University Southeast Asia Programme.  

SOJOURN Special Issue: Revisiting Key Texts in Southeast Asian Studies

SOJOURN , RCSC’s in-house journal, has put out a special issue on the most influential books of Southeast Asian Studies (Volume 24, No. 1, April 2009). RSCS members have each contributed review essays to the special issue. The review essays are “Nationalism in Southeast Asia: Revisiting Kahin, Roff and Anderson” (by Dr Terence Chong); “The (Un)Changing World of Peasants: Two Perspectives” (by Dr Hui Yew-Foong); “Furnivall’s Plural Society and Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma ” (by Dr Lee Hock Guan); and “Revisiting Two Classics: Charting the Mental World of the Oppressed” (by Dr Ooi Kee Beng).

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