Revolutionary countryside: Life on the land after Myanmar's military coup

Revolutionary countryside: Life on the land after Myanmar's military coup

Women’s work is critical to revolutionary projects, yet is often written out of war stories. After the 2021 Myanmar military coup, new and renewed patterns of violence, displacement and resistance spread across the countryside, disrupting and reworking agrarian life. Bringing together interdisciplinary feminist insights from the fields of war studies, political ecology, and geography, this project draws on methodologies such as participatory photography and critical mapping to understand gendered relations of land, labor, and love in the Myanmar Spring Revolution.

Through collaborations with farmers, artists, students, and activists, we seek both to document everyday experience and to enact a more emancipatory politics. In this talk, we will give an overview of the project’s motivation, methodologies, analyses and engaged activities before focusing on a new paper that interweaves an illustrated personal narrative with historical and cartographic analysis in order to write a feminist counter-topography of the revolutionary countryside.

SPEAKERS:

Hilary Faxon is an Assistant Professor at the University of Montana, currently on leave as a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Copenhagen, where she researches and teaches on environment, development, gender, and technology, with a focus on agrarian and political change in Myanmar. 

Jenny Hedström is an Associate Professor at the Swedish Defense University, where she researches and teaches on gender, war, and peace, with a focus on civil wars in Myanmar.

CHAIR: Hunter Marston

The Myanmar Research Centre Dialogue Series’ 2023 program includes a special series of nine presentations on the theme of revolution and solidarity in Myanmar, which is based on a collection of papers commissioned by the Myanmar Research Centre and the Danish Institute for International Studies.