Events

This workshop is part of the project “Archiving the Underclasses: Knowledge, Law, and Everyday Agency in Modern Southeast Asia”, funded by a Tier 2 grant from the Singapore Ministry of Education.

This publication-driven workshop considers the role of law in the formation, erosion, and mobilization of identities known collectively as the “underclass”. It examines the epistemological processes and institutions underlying the legal/administrative/scholarly construction of the underclass in Southeast Asia.  Following recent work that has sought to unpack this notion of a “subpopulation” in a predominantly N. American context, we explore how this community of advanced marginality has been constructed in Southeast Asian contexts over time and space (Wacquant 2022). Second, this workshop directs fresh attention to exploring the lives, experiences, and contributions of an epistemological underclass—bureaucrats, paralegals, witnesses, defendants, jurors, translators, clerks, informants, court personnel, legislators, archivists, fixers, editors, and web designers—who operate in the background, alongside, or behind the scenes of the knowledge production process (Said, 1989). In doing so, we treat the underclass not only as the object of legal-scholarly epistemologies, but as active subjects in the construction of knowledge pertaining to marginality in Southeast Asia.  

Selected papers should address one or more of the following questions:

1. What is the role of the law in the construction of the underclass?
2. What aspects of legal rationale, method, and/or practice contribute to the construction of underclass as both a legal and humanities/social science category?
3. How are notions of identity, community, and culture acquired and appropriated by law in their rendering of the underclass?
4. In what ways do particular social, political, cultural, or intellectual contexts or concerns shape legal notions of the underclass?
5. In what ways do spatial contexts inform legal understandings of the underclass and in what ways does law delineate spaces associated with the underclass?
6. How might we define the “epistemological underclass” and what are their heuristic/intellectual contributions to the study of Southeast Asia?
7. What are the epistemological legacies of research on the underclass in our understanding of historical and contemporary Southeast Asia?
8. How has court or judicial rhetoric shaped the discourses of the underclass and how have discourses of the underclass shaped legal rhetoric?

PARTICIPATION

Please note that participation in the closed-door workshop is by invitation only. 

WORKSHOP CONVENORS

A/P Maitrii Aung-Thwin
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

Dr George Radics
Department of Sociology & Anthropology, National University of Singapore