Audio Recording Part 1
Audio Recording Part 2
Audio Recording Part 3
Tuesday, March 27, 2018
2:00 PM – 4:00 PM
The George Washington University
Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street NW
Lindner Family Commons, Room 602
Washington, DC 20052
Gallery 102 is proud to present “As The World Watches.” This exhibition presents a select collection of responses to the humanitarian crisis affecting communities in Myanmar (formerly Burma). Like many other countries in our modern era, Myanmar is experiencing an increasingly fractured society and a growing radical movement within their politics. In keeping with some of history’s worst examples of conflict, the rapidly escalating violence in Myanmar is centered around religious and ethnic divisions. Recent riots have caused massive upheaval in the country, bringing long past due attention to the host of human rights issues affecting the Rohingya people. In the wake of this flood, the world has begun to turn its focus on the true cost and scope of a modern genocide. The aim of As The World Watches is to raise awareness of Myanmar’s long history of displaced peoples, and examine how the concept of “Other” has led to the systematic and ongoing annihilation of entire communities. Change can only begin with knowledge.
As part of this series, Gallery 102 and the Sigur Center for Asian Studies will present a film screening of “Left for Dead: Myanmar’s Muslim Minority.” The film shows what VICE News uncovered about its investigation into the violence and discrimination faced by the country’s Muslim minority. Following the screening will be a panel discussion on the film and the broader social, political, and historical context of the situation.
Discussants:
Layla Saad, Gallery 102 Curator & Co-Chair
Dr. Christina Fink, Professor of Practice of International Affairs, GW
Matthew Wells, Senior Crisis Advisor, Amnesty International
Robert Marro, Burma Task Force
About the film:
In recent years, democratic reforms have swept through Myanmar, a country that for decades was ruled by a military junta. As the reforms took hold, however, things were growing progressively worse for the Rohingya, a heavily persecuted ethnic Muslim minority concentrated in the country’s western state of Rakhine.
The 2012 gang rape and murder of a Buddhist woman by three Muslim men ignited violent riots in which hundreds were killed as Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya attacked each other. In the following months, tens of thousands of Rohingya were rounded up and forced to live in squalid camps; Human Rights Watch deemed the attacks crimes against humanity that amounted to ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. Thousands of Rohingya have since attempted to leave the country, fueling the region’s intricate and brutal human trafficking network.
Dr. Janet Steele is an associate professor of journalism at the George Washington University and the director of the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication. She received her Ph.D. in History from the Johns Hopkins University and focus on how culture is communicated through the mass media.
Dr. Jonathan Stalling is Professor of English specializing in East-West Poetics at the University of Oklahoma, where he is a founding editor of Chinese Literature Today magazine and book series and the Curator of the Chinese Literature Translation Archive at the University of Oklahoma Library. He is also the Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of China’s Literature Abroad at Beijing Normal University and was the 2015 Poet in Residence at Beijing University. Dr. Stalling is the author of six books of literary scholarship, translation and poetry and his opera 吟歌 丽诗 was staged at Yunnan University in 2010.
Dr. Mikhail Pelevin is Professor of Iranian Philology at St. Petersburg State University (Russian Federation). His main area of research is the early modern Pashto literature conceptualized as the most distinct and expressive element of social culture and ethnic self-identification of Pashtuns in the transition period from the late Middle Ages to modern times. Among his publications in Russian are books Khushhal Khan Khatak (1613-1689): the Beginning of the Afghan National Poetry (2001), Afghan Poetry in the First Half and the Middle of the Seventeenth century (2005), Afghan Literature of the Late Middle Ages (2010); a new book The Khattaks’ Chronicle: the Corpus and Functions of the Text is coming soon. Few recent articles are available in English, e.g.: “The Beginnings of Pashto Narrative Prose” (2017), “Persian Letters of a Pashtun Tribal Ruler on Judicial Settlement of a Political Conflict”, 1724 (2017), Daily Arithmetic of Pashtun Tribal Rulers: Numbers in The Khataks’ Chronicle (2016), “Ethnic consciousness of Pashtun Tribal Rulers in Pre-modern Times” (2015). M. Pelevin teaches courses on Persian, Pashto, the history of Persian and Pashto literatures. His other academic interests include Iranian dialectology and Muslim law.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine; Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies; a member of Dissent Magazine‘s editorial board; and an academic editor of the China Channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He has contributed commentaries and reviews to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and various other newspapers and to magazines. His other books include, as editor, The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China (2016). He received his PhD from UC Berkeley.
Maura Cunningham is an Associate at the University of Michigan’s Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies and edits the #Asianow blog of the Association for Asian Studies. She has written on modern Chinese history for the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ms., World Policy Journal, and Time. A past editor of China Beat, she is an advising editor to the China Channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books. She received her PhD from UC Irvine.
Ornit Shani is a scholar of politics and modern history of India. Her research focuses on the modern history of democracy and citizenship in India, as well as the rise of Hindu Nationalism, identity and caste politics, and communal and caste violence. Dr. Ornit was a Research Fellow at St. John’s College, Cambridge University and holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her new book How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise explores the creation of the electoral roll and universal adult franchise in India. Dr. Shani’s other research interests include modern South Asia, democracy and democratization, India’s constitutionalism, India legal history, Indian elections, nationalism, and identity politics.
