We are pleased to welcome Vatthana Pholsena and Gábor Vargyas as our 2023 keynote speakers!
Vatthana Pholsena, Chair, Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore will present our first keynote on Thursday, 12 October. Her topic is the state of current research on Southeast Asia seen from the point of view of the National University of Singapore. Her current research covers the social and political history of the Cold War from the vantage point of the Lao-Vietnamese and Lao-Thai borderlands, and the nexus between state, local elite, and ethnicity in post-socialist Laos. More generally, her research interests include the processes of state and social formation in borderlands, the interaction between the past and personal and collective memories, and issues relating to ethnicity and multiculturalism in Southeast Asia.
Research in Vietnam by a Hungarian fieldworker the time of the Communist Brotherhood to the post-communist era is the topic of our second keynote, to be given by Gábor Vargyas on Friday, 13 October 2023. He is Professor Emeritus, Institute of Ethnology, Research Centre for the Humanities at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has conducted in-depth studies on Vietnamese minorities and has made many intensive field trips to the Truong Son archipelago, Central Highlands, Vietnam. His most important fieldwork was carried out among the Bru, a mountain ethnic minority group inhabiting the area between the central Vietnamese coast and the middle reaches of the Mekong River.
