Talks/Updates

Asian borders are often sites of division, surveillance, and militarization that usurp histories of indigenous sovereignty and fluid mobility, even as they are developed as zones of superficial connectivity. Against these spectacles, ordinary people escape and cross borders every day, often in illicit, unspectacular ways. For example, in the late 1980s, a network of transnational 'rebel' organizations facilitated the clandestine movement of Kachin children across Myanmar's borders into China and India for safekeeping. Undertaking dangerous journeys and dodging multiple security regimes, the children lived most of their lives as ‘illegal’ transnational subjects, only to return decades later to a distant war-torn 'homeland.' Building on a book project that assembles such oral histories and ethnographies of mobility across Myanmar’s borderlands, this talk explores what trans-Asia might mean when seen from the border-worlds of Asia. In doing so, it shows the production of Asian spaces and identities that do not sit comfortably within the boundaries of area studies.

Jan 2023: Exiled from home and humanity. A review. SJTG

It was a pleasure to be invited to review for Nasir Uddin's book, The Rohingya An ethnography of 'Subhuman Life' by the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in Asia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, an ongoing genocide, or (the limits) of humanity. I was joined in the review forum by Prem Kumar Rajaram and Kazi Fahmida Farzana, along with Nasir Uddin's response to the reviewers. More critical reflections can be found in the links below.

The essays are all open-access and can be found here.

Farzana's Review: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/sjtg.12453

Sarma's Review: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sjtg.12455

Rajaram's Review: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sjtg.12456

Review Response: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sjtg.12457

August 2022: NIAS Keynote Talk: Being Young and Mobile on an Asian Borderworld

It was an honour to be invited as one of the keynote speakers for the NIAS (Nordic Institute of Asian Studies) Generation Asian Conference at the University Of Iceland. The other keynote speakers were Carol Gluck (Columbia University) and Chelsea Szendi Schieder (Aoyama Gakuin University), both admirable feminist scholars noted for their work on Japan. The conference was opened by the historian and current President of Iceland, Guðni Th. Jóhannesson.

My keynote talk, titled "Being Young and Mobile on an Asian Border-world" took generation Asia to Asian Borderlands – exploring what it means to be young, mobile, and caught up in the intimate geopolitics of some of Asia’s violent Borderworlds. I consider how and why young people are crossing them, suffering them, and profiting from them.

The talk illustrated these questions by building on empirical fieldwork from my ongoing book project, which ethnographically investigates how and why borderlands in Asia, particularly Northeast India and Myanmar, are also extractive frontier capitalist projects, while also being violent, dangerous, and highly militarised spaces of conflict, state making and armed struggle. We hear on-the-ground documentation of young people’s life stories from Yunnan, Kachin, Shan, Chin, Rakhine, and Mizoram states between India, Myanmar, and China, with an emphasis on what stakes they have in the resource and conflict landscapes both before and after Covid-19 and the 2021 Myanmar coup.

"Demystifying the Belt and Road Initiative"

"Discusses some of the assumptions that have emerged in the global discourse on the Belt and Road Initiative and provides research-based knowledge that should help us better understand what BRI is, and what it is not."

To learn more, read PDF here.

"China’s global development model: Looking beyond the Belt and Road Initiative"

China’s development practices have several unique characteristics. These include

speed, low costs, a pragmatic business orientation, and a style of project governance

and management that is often at odds with Euro-American approaches. But while China

often presents its approach as an alternative, it is nevertheless partly embedded in mainstream global patterns of development and financialization. To learn more, read our Factsheet here.

August 2022 : New review and forum editor at Geopolitics

Excited to start as the review essay and forum editor for Geopolitics.

Geopolitics is an international and multidisciplinary journal devoted to contemporary research on geopolitics, political geography, international relations, and global politics.

I look forward to working with new ideas, themes, and voices from various spaces and languages, particularly those that are often subsumed in major academic journals published out of the global North.

I specifically want to work towards highlighting the everyday and gendered aspects of geopolitics, along with other critical and feminist approaches to the study of intimate and critical geopolitics/ political geography.

We are generally open to geopolitical forums on any thematic suggestions and book review essays. We take the term 'geopolitics' in its widest and most critical meanings. In the next few months, we will particularly be looking for contribution themes of Ukrainian-Russian intimate geopolitics, but also the geopolitics of heath (viral-geopolitics); urban geopolitics, privacy, and data/digital geographies, and the geopolitics of domestic fundamentalism. I am also looking for forum ideas on the geopolitics of movements (such as refugees, weapons, medicines, development practitioners, and dissidents.)

Please send in your proposals to: jasnea.sarma@geo.uzh.ch.

May 2022: Special report on South Asian Borders and Frontiers.

A new special report co-authored by me and Claudia China reflects on South Asian Borders and Frontiers. The report builds on the ISAS-KAS annual themed conference panels and their contributors, held virtually from Singapore, 2021.

April 2022: Special Issue on Myanmar's Resource Frontiers.

Sarma, J., Faxon, H. O., & Roberts, K. B. (2022). Remaking and Living with Resource Frontiers: Insights from Myanmar and Beyond. Geopolitics, 1–22.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2022.2041220

This is Open Access! Go get it!

June 2022: The Wang Gungwu Award and Prize.

I am humbled and honoured to receive the Wang Gungwu Gold Medal and Prize for the best thesis in the Humanities and Social Sciences category at the National University of Singapore, 2021/22. Ineed, this is some good news in these bleak time, and welcome encouragement for an early career scholar.

My Ph.D. thesis, titled, “Seeing Like A Border: Voices, Visions and Resource Frontiers on Myanmar’s borderlands with India and China', offers comparative and feminist ethnographies of the entanglements of resource extraction, capitalist/state-driven mega infrastructural projects, armed conflict and, everyday life on the 'borderwords' between Northeast India, Northern Myanmar, and Southwest China.

“The Wang Gungwu Medal and Prize is a university-level award given to a single recipient in the Social Sciences/Humanities and Natural Sciences at the National University of Singapore each year. No award is made unless there is a candidate of sufficient merit. The Prize/Awards Committee comprises nominees from the different Faculties/Schools in FASS and is awarded by the Board of Graduate Studies.”

The award is humbling because I don't think it's even possible to call it my own. It is entirely dedicated to, and possible because of the people I interviewed and got to know and who helped me between and across the borderlands of Myanmar with Northeast India and Southwest China, over five years of research. Their generosity, knowledge, and life stories animate my ethnographic analysis of what to means to see like a border - when you look at the relationships between space, conflict, extraction and ecological damage.

I worked closely with the Department of Geography at NUS, and its research groups, having been co-advised by James D Sidaway (Geography, NUS), and historians Prasenjit Duara (Duke University) and Maitrii Aung-Thwin (History, NUS and the Asia Research Institute (ARI.) I am grateful for this great team of mentors.

I have so many more people to thank. The front matter of the thesis, including a complete acknowledgment section (6 pages long!), summary and introduction will be uploaded on my academia page.

July 2021: Webinar on Burma in the Context of Militarised violence. York University, Canada. Click here to watch.

June 2021: Special Report on India and the Myanmar Crisis. Click here to read.

May 2021 : ISAS, NUS Book Discussion: Imagining Afghanistan and The Frotier in British India with Nivi Manchanda and Thomas Simpson. Click here to watch.

March 2021: Scholar Activism and the Myanmar Resistance panel discussions organised by UC Berkeley on Social movements and the coup in Myanmar. Click here to watch.