This workshop will explore different practices and imaginaries of haunting, death, and time, drawing on empirical research from Southeast Asia. In parts of Southeast Asia, such as Myanmar, where conflict has led to repeated waves of displacement, attention to ghosts or specters can help challenge how time, history and experience are defined, imagined and performed – time often becoming cyclical. By approaching events, documents, practices and processes through the lens of temporality, specters and ghosts, we can see how death, violence and exclusion haunts and subtly shapes contemporary warfare, political settlements, and processes of knowledge making in Myanmar and elsewhere. This workshop brings together scholars working across the social sciences (including anthropology, political geography and war studies) to explore how ghosts upset conceptions of time, shape political possibilities and help us reconceptualize both past and contemporary politics.

In connection with this workshop an open seminar is organized on 6 May, 13.00-15.00: Real Farmers, Dream Cities: Agrarian Change, Demonstration, and the Politics of Visibility in Myanmar by Courtney T. Wittekind, Department of Anthropology, Purdue University (please see separate announcement for more details about this seminar).

For more information about the workshop, please contact Tomas Cole, tomas.cole@socant.su.se, or Jenny Hedström, jenny.hedstrom@fhs.se.