Southeast Asia Regional Program/Culture and Creativity

Like the other two LAB collaborations, the target here, too, is to examine and understand the impacts regionalization and globalization are having on poor and excluded groups in the GMS. Many such groups are mobile populations such as migrants or refugees, or belong to ethnic or religious minorities, or live in sensitive border areas or remote uplands environments. Poverty and exclusion within GMS countries thus tends to correlate with minority status; the benefits and opportunities brought by trade liberalization, improved cross-national transportation networks, and new communications technologies do not always reach these communities. There is also a history of inter-ethnic or inter-religious tension and even conflict both within and across countries in the sub-region: There is thus a great need to develop better understanding and tolerance on all sides of the “majority-minority” divides, a need to secure and promote legal rights such as citizenship, and a need to erase prejudice and stigmatization.

The LAB collaboration with Creativity and Culture aims then to develop better knowledge about how identity boundaries—especially as they affect the poor and excluded—are constituted, maintained or changed, and how they may be bridged. Despite the tendencies to freeze or contain identities, the initiative recognizes that individual and group identities are indeed porous, flexible, multiple and dynamic. On-going and planned grants are supporting efforts that involve people from particular ethnic or religious groups, whether minority or majority, examining their own situations or developing knowledge collaboratively with others about the challenges that they and their neighbors are facing. The initiative also recognizes the often key roles in questioning, influencing and changing public attitudes that cultural and arts institutions, as well as individual scholars, public intellectuals, and artists can play. Grants are also therefore going to support collaborations among educational institutions, arts educational institutions, and institutions such as museums and publishers in order to strengthen their capacities and to expand their knowledge and outreach.

As this is a relatively new initiative, staff are continuing to explore suitable grant-making strategies directed at addressing the above challenges. It is hoped that much of the current work on promoting knowledge-building and capacity-building in mapping and understanding the ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural complexities of the sub-region’s peoples will directly feed into further fruitful areas of support relating to Creativity and Culture’s thematic interest, to the main LAB programs, and to the other collaborative initiatives.

 

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