Henry Luce Foundation supports new 'Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network' programme (2017-2020)

22 November 2016

The International Institute for Asian Studies is extremely pleased to be able to announce that the Henry Luce Foundation (New York, NY) has awarded a four-year grant of US$360,000 for the new Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network (SEANNET) programme (2017-2020).

This new 'urban' initiative of IIAS is about research, teaching and dissemination of knowledge on Asia through the prism of city neighborhoods and urban communities.

It will support the development of contextualised knowledge on the spatio-human environment of neighbourhoods in six selected Southeast Asian cities, through participative field-research, in situ policy roundtables, local capacity building exercises, academic conferences, publications, documentary films and new syllabi. 

The six selected cities are: Mawlamyine in Myanmar; Chiang Mai and Bangkok in Thailand; Manila in the Philippines; Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam; ​Surabaya in Indonesia.

The aim of this micro-local framework of scholarly and civic engagement is to generate alternative, generalisable paradigms on city neighborhoods. A second ambition of the programme is to shape and empower a community of early career scholars and practitioners working on/from Southeast Asia who will contribute to the growing body of humanistically informed knowledge on Asian cities.