Rationale

 The School of Arts and Social Sciences (SASS), Sunway Campus identifies the issue of social inclusion as its education strength. Broadly, Social Inclusion considers the ways in which Southeast Asian nations construct and negotiate with marginal communities, and the strategies employed in advancing and affirming, or conversely, limiting and denying such groups social and/or political positions. As such, the education strength emphasizes areas such as subalternism, human rights and ethics, social justice, and issues of marginality.

 The promotion of this strength directly signals SASS’s divergence from other local and regional institutions offering Southeast Asian as an area of study. While most of the latter remain broad based in their approach to the study of Southeast Asia, SASS’s focus on social inclusion would mean that the pedagogical concentration would be on specific areas within social and political sciences and the humanities that directly deal with matters pertaining to justice, human and other forms of rights, human security issues and ethics.

 Finally, this strength also coincides with Monash University’s new Vice Chancellor Prof. Edward Byrne’s injunction and vision to be socially inclusive in the university’s pedagogical objective. As education in the Humanities and Social Sciences should be aimed at transforming individuals and societies into more humane, ethical entities, SASS’s will indeed be leading the university in an area vital to the survival of Southeast Asian communities and society as a whole.

 Objectives

 Monash’s SASS aims to pioneer the study of social inclusion in the Southeast Asian region.  To this end, we have narrowed down our emphasis to two related areas of enquiry:

• Politics and Society: This includes studying both local and regional socio-political strategies and policies in their treatment of and negotiation with marginal, often disenfranchised groups. Issues such as human rights as well as other forms of rights such as economic and cultural rights (for various subaltern groups perceived to be socially or politically aberrant, or for groups who continue to suffer from lack of socio-political representations like the indigenous people and women), and the security of marginalized groups (such as migrants and refugees) are especially emphasized.
• Ethics and Religion: This involves the study of the way in which various social groups have been constructed by Southeast Asian nations’ ethical and religious imperatives to foreground either their belonging to the wider society, or their exclusion; as well as what strategies are to be undertaken to reassess and transform such imperatives.  

 Methods and Approaches

To achieve the aim of consolidating the School’s strength to reflect the area of Social Inclusion, several strategies will be implemented. Some of them are already in place, and have been administered successfully and with care in the last few years, while others are in the works. With constant monitoring and reviewing so as to ensure that they improve, it is hoped that with the consolidation of the education strength, they will be more tightly bound to the School’s overall education objectives and find support from the University.

Furthermore, these strategies will be a two-pronged approach: from within the curriculum and through extra-curricular activities related to what the School teaches. 

(a) From within the curriculum.

The various units taught in the School will be linked to the theme of Social Inclusion. Whether they are international relation units, or literary and film studies, or units in media and communication, issues directly pertaining to raising awareness of the plight of marginal groups, as well as their construction and representation (affirmative or problematic) in the media will be prioritized in order to foster and provoke debates about rights, ethics and notions of subalternism.

Our focus is on Malaysia as both a discrete entity for study as well as a site for comparison. That is, while emphasis is always placed on the study of social inclusion in Malaysia, it is also conscientiously aimed at studying this phenomenon of this nation as juxtaposed with the nations in this region. In this way, a more dynamic understanding of what social inclusion means for various subaltern groups in Southeast Asia will be insightfully illuminated.

 As a foreign and private university strategically situated in this pluralistic nation, Monash Sunway is uniquely poised to interrogate the structuring properties (religion, race, education, law. race) of this country and its neighbors from an “insider’s” perspective with regard to issues of social inclusion locally and in the region. In this way, our pedagogical approach is no longer merely a matter of objective contemplation, but lived experiences as well, which will translate into a deepened sense of civic consciousness, human rights, and marginality, as well as the socio-political trajectories that promote or obstruct them.  

 To this end, several units developed specifically by Malaysian campus academic staff are already in place. They include:

       INT2085/3085: Governing the Global Economy: Stability, Efficiency, Justice – this unit introduces students to the politics of governing the global economy, exploring how local and regional factors, including from Southeast Asia, inform and influence the processes and institutions that constitute global economic governance, and the extent to which these processes focus on economic efficiency and stability as goals of governance or whether justice is and should be a central focus.

      WRT2407: Postcolonial and Diasporic Literature – this unit looks at the postcolonial literary experience of the people living in the Southeast Asian, as compared to those experiences of India and the Asian-American diaspora. Issues related to belonging and nationalism are emphasized, especially in the way a nation’s promotion of economic, racial or religious supremacy of certain communities result in the marginalzation and denial of others.

      FTV2120/3120: Malaysian Cinema and FTV2110/3110: Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia – These units evaluate both the historical legacy and contemporary practice of regional cinemas in the way they capture, represent and problematize political/social issues. Question about the ethics of representation (whether or not, for example, cinema functions as propaganda to demonize certain marginal communities or as criticism against their discrimination) are particularly important in these units to foster a more critical, socio-politically and ethically inflected way of viewing the moving image.

 Most of the other units taught in the School hail from Clayton or Gippsland. While a theoretical, multidisciplinary perspective –often Western inflected – emphasized by these units are conveyed to students, examples are, instead, gleaned from Malaysia and the rest of Southeast Asia to contextualized learning and to prompt students to think about issues of social inclusion in this region. This will not only enable students to consider the efficacy of such Western-inflected notions of, for example, human rights, to an Asian region, but to question their usefulness and applicability as well. As a result, a deeper meditation on ethics and representations is encouraged, thus promoting a more dynamic and comparative approach to learning about social inclusion. Existing units that already contribute to this purpose include the following:

·         INT2/3050: Mobile Worlds (which studies migrants and refugees, and the politics of belonging)

·         INT2/3030: Nationality, Ethnicity and Conflict

·         Two GND (Gender) units

·         COM2411/3411 :Media, Culture, Power

·         JRN2909/3909: Media Law

·         JRN2910/3910: Journalism Ethics

The School will also contact the Faculty of Arts (Monash Australia) to discuss the possibility of devising a new major that directly reflects the Education Strength. It is envisioned, if all comes together, that SASS will offer a BA in Southeast Asian Studies focusing on the theme of social inclusion by 2014.

 (b) Extra-curricular Activities

Workshops and Seminars:

(a) Journalism and film-making Workshops: Through a series of workshops run by experts and practitioners of the fields, students are encouraged to put their theoretical learning into actual application within the disciplines of journalism and film studies. In these workshops, students are encouraged to think about the ethics of representation and journalistic reporting especially with regard to discriminated or powerless groups in Malaysia and Southeast Asia, and how the craft of film-making and journalism can be gainfully employed to advance their causes. 

(b) SASS Seminar Series: Once a month during semester, the School runs a Seminar Series. Notable academics or activists are invited to share their views on and experiences in the contemporary socio-cultural and political scenes related to Malaysia and Southeast Asia. By exposing students to these series of high-profile talks, they will discover that what they learn in class are not only contemporary but have direct impacts on their lives as citizens, as sexual/raced beings and as individuals with rights. Speakers who have graced the series include: Professor Clive Kessler, Lat (the Malaysian cartoonist), Professor Diane Stone, Hishamuddin Rais (Malaysian activist) and others. For complete details, see:

 http://www.sass.monash.edu.my/Seminar%20Series/Seminar%20SeriesA.htm

(c) “Nasi Bungkus” Cinema (“Packed Lunch” Cinema: This is a monthly event held to foster the following aims:

1.       To support the screening of films made by students at Monash Sunway

2.       To screen Malaysian and Southeast Asian films and documentaries and to make those screenings open to members of the public.

This activity supplements not only the film studies units of SASS, but complements the other educational approaches conducted via extra-curricular programs, such as the study trips and the workshops. Many of the films showcased raises pertinent issues about belonging and subalternism; as such, this platform also provides students the opportunity to critique the ethical representation of subjectivities, and the power of the visual to create social and political awareness. 

Engagement with Non-government Organizations

(a) NGOw Your World Day: This forum provides students with opportunities to seek internships and explore career opportunities with Malaysian and regional NGOs, almost all of them involved in issues of social inclusion . SASS hopes to formalize it into an annual event to create a crucial niche between its pedagogical contents and its impact on students and social entities.

(b) Placement: The School is currently working on a placement program which will enable students to work directly with local NGOs or the various media/communication organizations. This program will constitute a unit in which students can enroll and gain credit points. It is hoped that this placement can be aligned with the NGO fair so as to coordinate both activities more effectively. 

Engagement with the World

(a) Local and Regional Study Trips: Since 2004, the SASS has been organizing a variety of study trips that have ranged from 1-day trips within Malaysia (visiting local/international media companies and civil society groups) to longer trips outside Malaysia, such as to Thailand, the Philippines and Cambodia. The objectives of these study trips are:

1)      expose students to the complex and changing social, cultural and political realities – most often to do with disenfranchised groups and human rights – within Malaysia and of neighbouring countries in the Southeast Asian region

2)      provide students with opportunities to hone their interviewing, video-documentary and journalistic and writing skills.

A major learning outcome of these trips is that students begin to see more tangibly the connection between what is taught in the classroom setting and the “outside world” in Southeast Asia. In short, they see that the world is their campus.

(b) Filmmaker- and writer-in-residency programs: The aim of this program is to provide space and resources already available at Monash Sunway to a filmmaker or writer who has successfully applied for the program to develop and make a film or writing project at our campus during the period of one teaching semester. Film-makers and writers from the postcolonial contexts and especially those who work on issues of marginality and subalternism will be privileged. The educational outcome of this project is the mentoring of students of film studies and writing by professional filmmakers and/or writers so as to enhance the former’s skills and knowledge in these disciplines. Students will learn important techniques and ethical imperatives surrounding representing the subaltern in social discourses and fictive texts. This will then lead to a tangible means for exposing the wider community to a niche area of our School’s teaching excellence. 

 Proposed budget

 Outcomes

 The various approaches outlined above, as well as the proposed budget to substantiate SASS’s envisioned education strength, bring many advantages to the School and the University as a whole. Amongst its most significant outcomes are:

·         Reflecting SASS’s endeavor to be the pioneering and leading School in Southeast Asian studies in social inclusion.

·         Strengthening the research-teaching nexus in areas directly related to issues of human rights, ethics, and subalternism and marginalization.

·         Contributing to the Monash Passport Program, especially via its B.A Global course and the various pedagogically laden extra-curricular approaches outlined above. 

 Members of the Education Strength:

  Leader:  Dr Andrew Ng Hock Soon

Members:

Dr Helen Nesadurai, Senior Lecturer (International Studies)

Dr Yeoh Seng Guan, Senior Lecturer (Communications)

Dr Sharon Bong, Senior Lecturer (Writing)

Mr Wong Chin Huat (Lecturer, Journalism)