The Journal of Burma Studies: Q&A with Jane Ferguson on Gender and Social Change in Myanmar Special Issue

Photo of Jane Ferguson
Photograph provided by Jane Ferguson

A new special issue from The Journal of Burma Studies is now available to readers on Project MUSE. “Gender and Social Change in Myanmar” analyzes the role of gender within social activism, everyday practices, identity politics, and religious histories in Myanmar are explored in this volume.

The Journal of Burma Studies was established in 1996, with current editor Jane M. Ferguson coming on board in December 2017.  She is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Southeast Asian History, and School of Culture, History, and Language at the Australian National University with a PhD in Anthropology and Southeast Asian history from Cornell University.

Ferguson’s publications include Repossessing Shanland: Myanmar, Thailand, and a Nation-State Deferred (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021) and Silver Screens, and Golden Dreams: A Social History of Burmese Cinema (University of Hawai‘i Press, forthcoming).

Below she shares with UH Press what its been like these last five years as the editor for The Journal of Burma Studies:

University of Hawai‘i Press: After half a decade sitting at the editorial desk, what issues or historic events have changed in your field? Additionally, why was this issue important now?

Jane Ferguson: The horrific events and repression following General Min Aung Hlaing’s 2021 military coup in Myanmar — for a country struggling with economic collapse from the COVID pandemic — constitute a large-scale humanitarian crisis, with war enveloping the country even more than in previous decades. JBS’ charter is to support research and education about and within the country; it is a minuscule contribution where civil war and repression are horrendous, but it does represent one forum for discussing issues that matter to Myanmar, from politics to history, art to popular culture and more. It is also worth engaging with Myanmar’s diverse, rich cultures, ecologies, languages, and human creativity. There is a massive humanitarian crisis in Myanmar, but focusing only on suffering risks ignoring the cultural diversity and tremendous vibrance of its people, historically and today.

UHP: JBS recently introduced a new Special Issue, “Gender and Social Change.” How did this come about? 

JF: “Gender and Social Change” is a capacious theme, and remains crucial for any context and study. It is accessible in the sense that despite the articles’ individual topics and particular research in Myanmar, the lessons are relatable to others. This issue deals with topics including gendered activism and transformation, religiosity, global popular culture, sexism, homophobia, and cyber-bullying; subjects of universal concern and relevance.  

The Special Issue on “Gender and Social Change in Myanmar” is part of our plan to reach out to and engage new and emerging scholars. JBS has general issues which gather individually-submitted articles, but the strategy for this Special Issue was to take a general, but pressing theme, and seek out different responses to it. We advertised the Special Issue via a call for abstracts, worked with authors through peer-review and the revision process, and wrote an introduction engaging the papers thematically and historically. 

UHP: What is next for JBS

JF: The Journal of Burma Studies will carry on its research and educational charter, working with new and returning authors to encourage lively debate and discussion about issues relevant to Myanmar, Southeast Asian Studies, or disciplinary themes writ large. Please stay tuned for the next call for papers for a thematic issue, or if you have a research topic you are working on please get in touch!

UHP: Do you have any advice for academics interested in submitting to The Journal of Burma Studies?

JF: Anyone interested in contributing to the Journal simply needs to send us an email and let us know! We have standard research articles, but also sections about research notes and book reviews. To support and encourage new authors, we have short written guides to help them navigate the waves of academic publishing.   

The Journal of Burma Studies
Volume 27, Number 1 (2023)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editor’s Note: Special Issue: Gender and Social Change in Myanmar
Jane M. Ferguson

Deconstructing and Reinforcing Gender Norms and Cultural Taboos in Myanmar’s Spring
Revolution

Aye Lei Tun

Our Htamein, Our Flag, Our Victory: The Role of Young Women in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution
Marlar, Justine Chambers, and Elena

Reconsidering Renunciation: Shifting Subjectivities and Models of Practice in the Biography of a
Buddhist Woman

MK Long

The Gendered Rebel: Challenging Gendered Norms through Punk in Urban Yangon
Carolin Hirsch

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Established in 1996, The Journal of Burma Studies is the premier peer-reviewed academic print journal that focuses exclusively on Burma. The Journal of Burma Studies is jointly sponsored by the Burma Studies Group and the Center for Burma Studies at Northern Illinois University.

It is published twice a year for the Center for Burma Studies. The Journal seeks to publish the best scholarly research focused on Burma/Myanmar, its ethnic nationalities, stateless and diasporic cultures from a variety of disciplines, ranging from art history and religious studies, to economics and law.

Submit your manuscript online.

New Journal Issues: Aloha Shirt Aesthetics, Patterns of Mortuary Practice in Vanuatu, Taiwan Sugar in the 1600s + More

Asian Perspectives

Volume 61, Number 1 (2022)

The new issue includes the following articles and reviews:

Lakheen-Jo-Daro, an Indus Civilization Settlement at Sukkur
in Upper Sindh (Pakistan): A Scrap Copper Hoard and
Human Figurine from a Dated Context

Paolo Biagi and Massimo Vidale

The Hamin Mangha Site: Mass Deaths and Abandonment
of a Late Neolithic Settlement in Northeastern China

Yawei Zhou, Xiaohui Niu, Ping Ji, Yonggang Zhu, Hong Zhu, and
Meng Zhang

Early Metal Age Settlement at the Site of Palemba, Kalumpang,
Karama Valley, West Sulawesi

Anggrreani

Patterns of Mortuary Practice over Millennia in Southern Vanuatu,
South Melanesia

Frédérique Valentin, Wanda Zinger, Alison Fenwick, Stuart Bedford,
James Flexner, Edson Willie, and Takaronga Kuautonga

Find more research articles and reviews at Project MUSE.

Biography

Volume 44, Issues 2 & 3 (2021)

Special Double Issue: Graphic Medicine

Graphic Medicine’s Possible Futures: Reconsidering Poetics and Reading
Erin La Cour and Anna Poletti

Conflict or Compromise?: An Imagined Conversation
with John Hicklenton and Lindsay Cooper about
Living with Multiple Sclerosis

John Miers

Out of Sync: Chronic Illness, Time, and Comics Memoir
Jared Gardner

Face as Landscape: Refiguring Illness, Disability,
and Disorders in David B.’s Epileptic

Erin La Cour

Graphic Confessions and the Vulnerability Hangover
from Hell

Safdar Ahmed

Drawn to History: Healing, Dementia, and the Armenian
Genocide in the Intertextual Collage of Aliceheimer’s

Crystal Yin Lie

Find more at Project MUSE.

Biography

Volume 44, Issue 4 (2021)

Open Forum Articles
Reviews

Editor Craig Howes embraces this volume as he explains:
“The latest issue of Biography qualifies as special because of its ordinariness. After a four-installment run featuring two special issues, an inaugural Forum, and the Annual Bibliography and International Year in Review, we now return to our regularly scheduled programming. Articles and book reviews—that’s all!
But the table of contents for this issue speaks to what has distinguished Biography for decades as a quarterly. First, the articles. Their geographic, historic, linguistic, and generic range is in keeping with our international and interdisciplinary profile. American celebrity biographies and philosophy, twentieth-century Indian regional autobiography, modernist Austrian psychoanalytic biography, post-WWII German-Romanian autofiction, contemporary Palestinian auto/biographical texts—our pages map out and tell the stories of the field.”

Find more articles and reviews at Project MUSE.

The Contemporary Pacific

Volume 34, Issue 1 (2022)

The new issue includes the following articles, dialogues, political, media, and book reviews.

One Salt Water: The Storied Work of Trans-Indigenous Decolonial Imagining with West Papua
Bonnie Etherington

Making Sartorial Sense of Empire: Contested Meanings
of Aloha Shirt Aesthetics

Christen T Sasaki

The Compensation Page: News Narratives of Public Kinship in Papua New Guinea Print Journalism
Ryan Schram

“We Are So Happy EPF Came”: Transformations of Gender in Port Moresby Schools
Ceridwen Spark and Martha Macintyre

Pacific People Navigating the Sacred Vā to Frame Relational Care: A Conversation between Friends across Space and Time
Silia Pa‘usisi Finau, Mele Katea Paea, and Martyn Reynolds

Find more articles, dialogues, political, media, and book reviews at Project MUSE.

The Journal of Burma Studies

Volume 26, Number 1 (2022)

Ritual and Play in Buddhist Nun-Making: Girlhood,
Nunhood, and the Shaping of the “Little Teacher” in
Today’s Myanmar

Rachelle Saruya

From Archenemy of the Nation to the Intimate
Other: Prince Damrong Rajanubhab’s
Journey
through Burma
and the Colonial Ecumene
Thanapas Dejpawuttikul


Military Rule with a Weak Army: Myanmar’s
Late Expansion

Marie-Eve Reny


Grassroots Roles and Leadership Aspirations:
The Experiences of Young Ethnic Women in
Myanmar Civil Society Organizations
Maaike Matelski and Nang Muay Noan

Find more captivating articles at Project MUSE.

Journal of World History

Volume 33, Number 2 (June 2022)

The “Material Turn” in World and Global History
Giorgio Riello

The Christian Seas of Kyushu: How Local Maritime Networks Facilitated the Introduction of Catholicism to Japan in the Mid-Sixteenth Century
Erik Glowark

From the Atlantic to the Manchu: Taiwan Sugar and the Early Modern World, 1630s–1720s
Guanmian Xu

The Myth of Immobility: Women and Travel in the British Imperial Indian Ocean
Scott Reese

Religion and the Contemporary Phase of Globalization: Insights from a Study of John Paul II’s World Youth Days
Charles Mercier

Find more research articles and reviews at Project MUSE.

 

 

New Journal Issues: Asian/Pacific Island Nursing Journal, Journal of Burma Studies, Language Documentation & Conservation + More (July 2020)

Asian/Pacific Island Nursing Journal
Front cover of Biography 42-4 (2020)

Biography

Academic Freedom, Academic Lives, Guest Edited by Bill V. Mullen and Julie Rak

Volume 42, Issue 4 (2019)

From the guest editors’ introduction:

Academic freedom is currently highly public and highly contested terrain. What academic freedom actually means has become an urgent question, as alt-right activists have turned the tenets of academic freedom to their own ends, whether on college and university campuses, or through the actions of right-wing governments as they move to suppress dissent. We want to reclaim the concept of academic freedom for the left and for academic activism, not through a debate about the concept as an abstraction, but in connection to what we see as the radical potential of academic lives. Thinking of academic lives as interpretation and critique is a way to disrupt the current alt-right control of public discourse about freedom of speech. Read the special issue introduction free here.

Front over of China Review International 25-2 (2018)
Journal of Burma Studies 24-1

The Journal of Burma Studies

Special Issue: Environment and Resources: Burma/Myanmar and the (Un)Natural

Volume 24, Issue 1 (2020)

The editor’s note for this special issue begins:

From touristic impressions to geopolitical analyses, ubiquitous are the tremendous and varied natural resources of Myanmar. Teak forests, oil and gas reserves, precious gemstones, biodiversity, and the list goes on. The very meaning of the concept of resource, however, suggests that the country contains things of tremendous potential human, economic use, and therefore value. With the resources, mapping, and study of them, there is the seemingly boundless potential for greater wealth to be accumulated. On the other hand, discourse regarding natural beauty and wonder can be a purposeful distraction from ongoing issues of war and exploitation. Discussing the country’s abundance of resources, however, is never a neutral proposition: for outsiders looking in, there is frequently a value-laden assumption which guides the observation that the various regimes and economic interests are not responsibly conserving these resources for the greater good (however nebulous that may be). Life itself (before we even label it a natural resource) is already an active zone of economic production, engineering, banking, commodification, and exchange (Palsson 2016:4). The definition, mapping, laws, and social relationships which name and frame resources in Myanmar are of ongoing heuristic, cultural, economic, and inevitably political concern.

With this problematic in mind, in this Special Issue of The Journal of Burma Studies (JBS) we have gathered together an interdisciplinary set of research articles surrounding questions of what nature is and what its resources might be. With the four authors’ varied focus on historical and contemporary Myanmar, this set of papers offers challenging new vistas for the exploration and interrogation of how resources and the environment have been approached and brokered by local and transnational actors. Read the special issue introduction free here.

Language Documentation & Conservation
Front cover of U.S.-Japan Women's Journal 55/56 (2019)

Top Articles from The Journal of Burma Studies, New UHP Title

Gate to Myang Gyi Ngu monastic community, Karen State. BGF guards control visitors for guns, drugs, alcohol and meat. DKBA has been ousted from the place. U Thuzana’s photo is in the middle (Photo courtesy of Mikael Gravers).
From Mikael Gravers’ “Disorder as Order“: Gate to Myang Gyi Ngu monastic community, Karen State. BGF guards control visitors for guns, drugs, alcohol and meat. DKBA has been ousted from the place. U Thuzana’s photo is in the middle (Photo courtesy of Mikael Gravers).

As we look forward to publishing the next issue of The Journal of Burma Studies, we’re pleased to share the top ten most-read articles on Project MUSE in the past year.

The Journal of Burma Studies is one of the only scholarly peer-reviewed journals that focus exclusively on Burma/Myanmar. 


 

Disorder as Order: The Ethno-Nationalist Struggle of the Karen in Burma/Myanmar€—A Discussion of the Dynamics of an Ethicized Civil War and Its Historical Roots
By Mikael Gravers
Volume 19, Number 1, June 2015

A Textbook Case of Nation-Building: The Evolution of History Curricula in Myanmar
By Nicolas Salem-Gervais and Rosalie Metro
Volume 16, Number 1, June 2012

“Transition”€ as a Migratory Model in Myanmar
By Felix Girke and Judith Beyer
Volume 22, Number 2, December 2018

“Making a Name for Themselves:” Karen Identity and the Politicization of Ethnicity in Burma
By Jessica Harriden
Volume 7, 2002

Rethinking Land and Property in a “Transitioning”€ Myanmar: Representations of Isolation, Neglect, and Natural Decline
By Elizabeth L. Rhoads and Courtney T. Wittekind
Volume 22, Number 2, December 2018

Appraisal of Burma/Myanmar’s Roundabout Roadmaps
By Khen Suan Khai
Volume 22, Number 2, December 2018

“Burmanization”€ and the Impact of J.S. Furnivall’s Views on National Identity in Late-Colonial Burma
By Carol Ann Boshier
Volume 20, Number 2, December 2016

Bitter Pills: Colonialism, Medicine and Nationalism in Burma, 1870-1940
By Penny Edwards
Volume 14, 2010

Notes on Burmese Manuscripts: Text and Images
By Christian Lammerts
Volume 14, 2010

The Disciplining Discourse of Unity in Burmese Politics
By Matthew J. Walton
Volume 19, Number 1, June 2015

 

UH Press to publish The Journal of Burma Studies in partnership with the Northern Illinois University, Center for Burma Studies

The University of Hawai‘i Press will publish and distribute The Journal of Burma Studies, one of the only scholarly peer-reviewed journals that focus exclusively on Burma/Myanmar. This new partnership with the Center for Burma Studies at Northern Illinois University begins with volume 23, 2019. The complete content of the journal is available online in Project MUSE.

UH Press Interim Director and Publisher, Joel Cosseboom, said: “We are pleased to partner with the NIU Center for Burma Studies on this important and unique journal.”

Edited by Catherine Raymond from Northern Illinois University, Center for Burma Studies and Jane M. Ferguson from Australian National University, The Journal of Burma Studies seeks to publish the best scholarly research focused on Burma/Myanmar and its minority and diasporic cultures from a variety of disciplines, ranging from art history and religious studies, to economics and law.

Dr. Ferguson looks forward to collaborating with UH Press to launch innovative and engaging issues of The Journal of Burma Studies. “University of Hawai‘i Press has consistently produced some of the most exciting publications on Southeast Asia as well as Burma/Myanmar Studies, so I am delighted that JBS will now work with them,” she said.

The journal is jointly sponsored by the Burma Studies Group and the Center for Burma Studies at Northern Illinois University. Published since 1997, the journal draws together research and critical reflection on Burma/Myanmar from scholars across Asia, North America and Europe.

Content is available on the Project MUSE platform.

Subscribe at: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/jbs/

Submit your manuscript at: https://jbs.scholasticahq.com/for-authors

The Journal of Burma Studies joins UH Press’s extensive list of Asian and Southeast Asian studies journals including: Asian Perspectives, Korean Studies, Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, Review of Japanese Culture and Society, and others.

About UH Press

 The University of Hawai‘i Press supports the mission of the university through the publication of books and journals of exceptional merit. It strives to advance knowledge through the dissemination of scholarship—new information, interpretations, methods of analysis—with a primary focus on Asian, Hawaiian, Pacific, Asian American and global studies. It also serves the public interest by providing high-quality books and resource materials of educational value on topics related to Hawai‘i’s people, culture, and natural environment. Through its publications the Press seeks to stimulate public debate and educate both within and outside the classroom.

About Northern Illinois University, Center for Burma Studies

 Founded in 1987, the Center collects and preserves information and artifacts of all kinds concerning the study of the peoples and cultures of Burma/Myanmar, and makes these materials broadly available for research and study.

The Center enjoys a unique relationship with the Burma Studies Foundation, which assures that all Burma/Myanmar-related items donated to the foundation will be offered to the center for inclusion and conservation within the university’s collections. Oversight by the foundation combines strong support of the center with lasting responsibility to the field of Burma/Myanmar studies.

The Center for Burma Studies is a non-political, non-degree granting, administrative and academic unit within Northern Illinois University. The Center has the following goals:

  • The maintenance and expansion of a comprehensive research library to sustain the field of Burma studies
  • The collection, care, and exhibition of the arts of Burma
  • The support and promotion of undergraduate and graduate teaching concerning Burma
  • The organization and hosting of self-supporting national and international conferences on Burma studies
  • The publication of relevant scholarship on Burma
  • The care and enhancement of archival resources such as photographs, music records, oral histories, personal papers, and field notes
  • The promotion of outreach activities to schools and communities
  • Encouraging the performance of Burmese arts
  • The securing of educational opportunities through scholarships, internships, and fellowships