A Grant for Summer Learning and Research in Southeast Asia

What made you decide to apply for a grant at the Leading House Asia?

As a department with a strong Asia focus and a chair with a longstanding interest and expertise in Southeast Asia, we decided to organize the international summer school “Southeast Asia in Motion”, first in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 2016, then in 2018 in Hanoi, Vietnam. The aim was to explore issues of transformation and development from various disciplinary angles and from the vantage point of diverging national histories. To do so, we put together a program that promoted the exchange of knowledge and experience across national and disciplinary boundaries and allowed conducting collaborative research between students from Switzerland as well as the Southeast Asian region, such as Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. At the same time, by organizing the international summer school together with various universities in the region, we aimed at strengthening the existing partnerships.

How did you secure a research partner?

To plan and carry out the international summer schools in Cambodia and in Vietnam, we relied on our relationships with local partners that we had already built during previous research stays and collaborative projects. The co-​organization of the summer schools with our partners ranged from jointly developing the curriculum, planning the teaching formats, selecting interesting field sites for the empirical studies to discussing the format of the evaluation. Our successful first international summer school in Cambodia was also conducive to the cooperation with our host in Vietnam, the USSH-​VNU.

How would you describe your experience of the programme?

Molly Fitzpatrick about the Summer School in Hanoi
:
It was incredible to see how the program connected students from all over Southeast Asia and Switzerland, and how students learned how to conduct ethnographic research in international groups. This was particularly visible during the last day of student presentations, when students presented their findings to leading experts from different participating universities. My most memorable experience was during the final dinner in Vietnam, when students from all the different countries played music together on their own instruments and sang songs in Vietnamese, Indonesian, Khmer, Thai, Burmese and English. The students told me afterwards that they kept in touch with each other and some of the Indonesian students stayed on in Vietnam to conduct research for their BA and MA theses. Another Vietnamese
student is now an intern in a new SNF project on development and innovation in Vietnam.

What role did the Leading House Asia play in the programme?

The Leading House Asia has played a crucial role in the realization of the two international summer school programs. Thanks to the generous funding of the Leading House Asia, we could carry out the summer schools in the form of three intense weeks of joint learning and researching. Importantly, the Leading House Asia has made the international setting of the summer school possible – a particular pillar of its innovativeness as it goes beyond the often-​upheld dichotomies of “Europe” and “Asia” – by giving numerous students from different national and cultural backgrounds the chance to attend the program.

What were the impacts you made through the project/partners/individual?

Since our two international summer schools “Southeast Asia in Motion” in Cambodia in July 2016 and in Vietnam in July 2018, there have been several initiatives to formalize the collaboration between the UZH and the Asian partner institutions. Memoranda of Understanding as well as a Student Exchange Agreements were signed between the UZH and the USSH-​Vietnam National University (Vietnam) and the Universitas Gadjah Mada (Indonesia). Some of our PhD and Master students already benefited from these agreements as they recently did or currently undertake fieldwork in Vietnam, Indonesia and Cambodia and are associated with our Southeast Asian partner institutions. For example, two Swiss students returned to Cambodia to conduct research for their MA theses and one will conduct PhD research in Vietnam. At the same time, some researchers and students from our Asian partner institutes were invited as speakers at our Institute Colloquium, as exchange students or interns. One Indonesian student obtained a Swiss Government Excellency Scholarship and is now a PhD student at the anthropology department at the UZH. These collaborations have strengthened the relationships with our Asian partners and shown that the agreements do not only exist on paper.

Testimonial: what were your personal experiences/thoughts on the bilateral cooperation experience?

Some quotes from the evaluation of the programme give a good insight into the overall experience.

“I loved the network building with scholars from different countries, as this is an important step towards developing cooperation in knowledge production.”

“There were many unforgettable aspects: learning collectively and from each other with people from various backgrounds, engaging in a research project, getting to know so many people from different countries!”

“I really liked the exchange during the summer school and felt it was different from the way you exchange in normal university classes. The discussions with people from different backgrounds were really enriching.”

“Networking was such an important aspect in this summer school. Initiated and made possible by a group of professors with a unique expertise in the field of anthropology, it bridged different generations of academics. It showed us with real, lived experiences that relations between researcher and informant, researcher and researcher, and elder and younger academics, are relations that last for a lifetime. I very much hope that this program will continue as a way to build future connections and networks.”