"The
Campus as Crucible: Student Activism in Singapore and Malay(si)a." Based on archival data, interviews, autobiographical and academic accounts, media reports, and more, this project investigates the history and characteristics of student activism in Malaysia. I seek to situate student activism among other social movements and the university campus among other political institutions, to understand when and how student activism impacts upon national politics, what differentiates student activism from other forms of political engagement, and how the sector in Malaysia differs from student activism elsewhere. Broadly speaking, I outline the contours of a much-understudied phenomenon in order to shed light on core dynamics in Malaysian political development. Although commonly dismissed or disregarded, student activism may be a complex and transformative political force and the campus, a critically important political institution. How should we make sense of this portion of the polity, assuming (as I do) that the sorts of mobilization and collective action represented in student protest are significant and distinctive? Meredith
Weiss is a Research Fellow at the East-West Center Washington. Previously,
she was an Assistant Professor of International Studies at DePaul University,
and has also taught at Georgetown and Yale. She received her PhD in Political
Science from Yale. A specialist in Southeast Asian politics, she is the
author of Protest and Possibilities: Civil Society and Coalitions for
Political Change in Malaysia (Stanford University Press, Oct. 2005) and
co-editor (with Saliha Hassan) of the volume, Social Movements in Malaysia:
From Moral Communities to NGOs (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). Her articles have
appeared in New Political Science, Journal of East Asian Studies, Commonwealth
& Comparative Politics, Asian Survey, Contemporary Southeast Asia
, and elsewhere, in addition to chapters in numerous edited volumes. Her
primary foci are civil society and social movements, nationalism and ethnicity,
gender, Islamist activism, and electoral politics in Malaysia and Singapore.
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