Yesterday I gave a talk at the Comparative and International Education Research Network, organized by Dr. Matthew Thomas, at the Universtiy of Sydney. The university has a strong interest in Southeast Asia through its Sydney Southeast Asia Centre. During the event I gave two talks, one an inside look at FreshEd and the other about my Kakenhi-funded research project. Here’s the abstract on my research presentation.

Making ASEAN: Insights through comparison

Southeast Asia is building a regional community through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a multi-national institution comprised of 10-member states. ASEAN aims to build a socio-cultural community by 2020. As part of its envisioned regional community, ASEAN wants to construct a regional identity by uniting over 600 million people, which will be achieved partly through national school systems that teach shared versions of history. What does an ASEAN identity look like? Is it even possible or desirable to establish a common identity across the diverse peoples of Southeast Asia? And how would a regional identity exist alongside national-identity given the divergent memories of history? In effort to begin answering these larger questions, this presentation compares the development of UNESCO Bangkok’s Shared Histories project with Cambodia’s on-going history curriculum reform.