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Dear readers,
Last year New Mandala was pleased to be able to introduce our Emerging Scholar Award, an initiative aimed at promoting the dissemination of outstanding PhD research on Southeast Asia to a global readership, while building emerging scholars’ skills in drafting and editing their work to reach audiences beyond academia. With the support from the Australian National University (ANU), we were able to offer small grants to 15 recently-graduated and soon-to-graduate PhD scholars to work with us to produce an essay based on their doctoral research.
I’m very grateful to everybody who took the time to apply for the Award. The number and quality of the applications was very impressive, and was a heartening testament to the global health of Southeast Asian studies despite the challenges facing the field. Indeed, in the course of members of our Editorial Advisory Board’s selection of awardees, it was decided to expand the number of essays from 15 to 24 to reflect the outstanding quality of submissions.
Today I’m very pleased to be able to introduce these 24 awardees, whose work will appear at New Mandala over the rest of 2025. We kick off this series with Ryan Gem’s exploration of how his research on the track records of female members of the Philippine Congress in pushing for progressive gender polices offers support for gender quotas in political institutions in the Philippines and elsewhere. You can click here to read Ryan’s essay.
I’d like to congratulate all the awardees for their hard work in preparing what will be a fantastic series of essays. I’d also like to express my thanks to the ANU for its support of this project, and to highlight the great work of Natalia Laskowska, Quinn Libson, and Catriona Richards in providing copy editing support.
Liam Gammon | the editor
Meet the authors
Joseph Edward B. Alegado is a PhD candidate at the ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy. His research sits on the intersection of degrowth, zero waste, and forms of alternatives to development in the Global South. Prior to starting his doctoral research, he has worked with non-profit organisations and environmental movements in the Asia Pacific region. He also teaches at Ateneo de Manila University and De La Salle University.
Panggah Ardiyansyah is a PhD candidate of History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS University of London. His research focuses on “Hindu–Buddhist” materials, from their origins in ancient Indonesia to their transforming status as “Islamic” constructions in later times. His doctoral project aims to contribute to decolonising the field of art history and archaeology by reconstructing the diachronic history of premodern materials across times and cultures in probing appropriations, transactions, and reconfigurations.
Cher Hui Yun is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute an associate member of the French Centre for Southeast Asia (CASE-EHESS-CNRS). She received her PhD from Inalco (Paris). Her dissertation focuses on mining companies’ strategies and adaptations to environmental, political and regulatory constraints in Malaysia, from the early 20th century to the present in the context of Chinese investment in Southeast Asian mines.
Lydia Cheng is a soon-to-be PhD graduate in the Discipline of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her doctoral research investigated the changing production of Singaporean lifestyle journalism, particularly in relation to journalistic roles, boundaries of journalism, and commercial influences on journalism. A recipient of the Australian Government RTP Scholarship, her research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals such as Journalism, Journalism Studies, and Journalism Practice.
Emi Donald is a PhD candidate at Cornell University’s Department of History. Their dissertation traces the historical foundations of Thailand’s contemporary LGBTQ+ movement by focusing on the public representation, activist agendas, and life stories of Thai thom (tomboys), women-loving-women feminists, and transmen. Donald writes and teaches on topics related to colonial and nationalist regimes of gender and sexuality, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements in Asia, and public history and archival praxis in the Global South.
Teuku Reza Fadeli is a recent PhD graduate in history from the University of York. His research examines how consumer culture shaped and reflected modernity in colonial Southeast Asia, focusing on cities like Surabaya, Penang, and Singapore during the 1920s and 1930s. His work analyses the ways in which advertising, urban spaces, and consumer choices created new forms of cultural identity and social transformation in a colonial context.
Fauwaz Abdul Aziz serves as Analyst at the History and Regional Studies program of the Penang Institute. He recently submitted his PhD dissertation to the Chair of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Bavaria, Germany. Entitled “The Tripartite Cultural Politics of Halal at the National Commission on Muslim Filipinos”, the dissertation explores the social limits and conditions of possibility for the decades-old project to institutionalise and regulate the halal industry in the formally secular, yet distinctly Catholic, Philippine state and society.
Ivo Mateus Goncalves da Cruz Fernandes received his PhD from the Australian National University in 2024 for a thesis exaimining Timor-Leste’s history of activism, with a focus on the history of student movements. His research interests are history and memory, cultural anthropology, ethnography research, history of student movements, the history of class formation, social impact studies and social movements.
Zali Fung is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne. She recently completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne, which examined community and civil society struggles over long-proposed hydropower dams and water diversions in the Thai–Myanmar borderlands of the Salween River Basin. Her PhD demonstrated how resistance under authoritarian conditions is often slow and unfolds “under the radar”, and highlighted how time can be used as a strategy for social movements to incrementally improve the conditions of development.
Ryan Gem is a researcher, writer, educator, and advocate for more inclusive and representative democracies. He is currently the Learning & Evaluation Manager at People Powered, a global hub for participatory democracy, and a Leading Edge Fellow through the American Council of Learned Societies. His research focuses on the impacts of increased diversity in political representation. Ryan completed his PhD in Political Science at the University of Washington. His dissertation centered on gender in the Philippines legislature.
Chabib Duta Hapsoro is a curator and PhD candidate at the Department of Malay Studies, National University of Singapore. His doctoral research examines the depoliticisation of Indonesian art in the New Order. Chabib published a book entitled Alam Terkembang Hilang Berganti (KPG, 2020), comprising his writings on art. He also co-edited Pusaka Seni Rupa II: Seni Patung Indonesia Modern (Directorate General of Culture, Ministry of Education and Culture, 2020).
Lamphay Inthakoun is a PhD candidate in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at The University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on the intersection of climate change and forest governance, specifically examining upland livelihoods and swidden cultivation in northern Laos. In her work, she explores how climate change and governance structures impact swidden farming communities, with a particular interest in how differing perceptions of deforestation and associated carbon emissions contribute to uneven policy implementations and changes in livelihoods.
Phianphachong Intarat is currently a lecturer at the Community Development Program in the Songkhla Rajabhat University’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. At the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, her PhD research explores the relationship between intersectional identity of the stateless Bamar Muslims along the Thai–Burma border, and their access to different forms of legal status the Thai government grants to its non-citizens.
Eunbi Ko is a PhD candidate in geography at the University of Melbourne. Her doctoral research investigates the mobilisation of the concept of indigenous territory in Cambodia’s highlands, drawing on perspectives primarily from political geography, political ecology, and decolonial thought. By theorising heterogeneous territory within contemporary resource frontiers, she aims to enhance the understanding of uneven spatial dynamics related to land dispossession, while also challenging universalised notions of territory and indigeneity.
Kurt W. Kuehne is a Sociologist and Postdoctoral Associate at New York University Abu Dhabi. He holds a PhD in Sociology and MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, as well as an AB in Politics from Princeton University. His ethnographic dissertation project examined politics and policy around the low-wage, short-term migrants who build and maintain the world’s rising global cities.
Khánh Linh Lê is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science and the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego. Her research examines the dynamics of contemporary state building and state-minority relations in Vietnam. Leveraging geospatial, text, and archival data, she explores the extent to which government policies like internal migration and education can facilitate the incorporation of ethnic minorities into the state, and when they might induce backlash.
Kara Ortiga is a PhD candidate at Macquarie University. Her work focuses on new media audiences and their relationships with technology, politics, and information. She studies political disinformation in the Philippines by examining users’ engagement with these narratives. She begins by talking to political influencers and their audiences who interact with problematic narratives as a starting point. By doing so, she hopes to gain insights into how they use digital media and what role such narratives play in their everyday life.
Floramante S.J. Ponce is a postdoctoral fellow at the Maison des Sciences Humaines de l’Université libre de Bruxelles (MSH–ULB). He has worked as a lecturer at the Martin Luther University’s Institute of Anthropology and Philosophy and the Polytechnic University of the Philippines’ Sociology and Anthropology Department. He completed his PhD in Social Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Germany), where his dissertation project and many of his peer-reviewed papers focus on how a Chinese BRI Project in Laos engenders experiences of modernity, market integration, and geographical, socioeconomic, and metaphorical (im)mobilities.
Louis Plottel is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Toronto. He has conducted research in Canada, the UAE, Indonesia, and the UK, focusing in particular on drug studies and issues of gender and sexuality. His current research looks at methamphetamine consumption among young men in Aceh, Indonesia, looking in particular at drug use in the context of labour pattern change.
Yunie Rahmat is a lecturer in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Institut Teknologi Bandung, where she is part of the Rural and Regional Planning Research Group. She recently completed her PhD at the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney, where her thesis explores the political economy of agrarian change in coastal Indonesia. She is an active member of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre and the Indonesia Council.
Bavo Stevens is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Political Science at McGill University and a Visiting Researcher at the Faculty of Political Science at Chulalongkorn University. He is currently doing fieldwork in Thailand for this thesis on the everyday politics of policing in Thailand. Bavo explores how police discretion—the selective or non-application of the law—impacts citizens’ access to civil and political rights. His research also touches on questions of police masculinity and gendered policing.
Kadek Wara Urwasi is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Research (IFAR) at Monash University Indonesia. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University. Her research interests include urban sociology, urban politics, and comparative historical sociology. Wara’s project explores the factors and processes that drive the variation and inconsistency in governmental responses to informal settlements in Jakarta across different regimes, focusing on leaders’ interests, community power, and ideational politics.
Purawich Watanasukh is a lecturer at the Faculty of Political Science, Thammasat University in Thailand. His PhD thesis at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, titled “The Politics and Institutional Change in the Senate of Thailand,” examines the Thai Senate’s role from 1932 to 2023. It argues that the Senate has acted as a “guardian of the status quo” by safeguarding veto powers and restricting the influence of democratically elected representatives in Thailand’s political system.”
Pasit Wongngamdee is a lecturer in the Faculty of Political Science, University of Ubonratchathani, Thailand. His PhD thesis explores how the Thai ROTC program (หลักสูตรรักษาดินแดน) indoctrinated students and how the indoctrination was resisted by those within it. His thesis does not only shed light on military indoctrination, but also soldier resistance and civil–military struggle in contemporary Thai politics. His other interests include morality, political culture, ideologies, conflict and violence in Thai politics.
