Project statement in English It would be wise to establish that, in Malaysia, the dichotomy between the unveiled and veiled woman as oppositional and mutually exclusive is a reductive one, masking the shifting subjectivities of women who wish to unveil but cannot, women who remove the veil but choose to eventually re-veil, women who… Continue reading Non-veiling and down-veiling narratives in Malaysia
Tag: Academia
New column: Greetings from corporate academia
My new column in the Malay Mail online, published on 4th June 2015: Private higher education in Malaysia has evolved into a new kind of species. Like a forest-dwelling creature adapting to its new habitat in denuded wastelands, private higher education has learned to transform its identity, priorities, and raison d’être in the surreal world… Continue reading New column: Greetings from corporate academia
Academic style
Google ‘academic style’ and chances are you’ll get academic writing style and not academic sartorial style. How is a woman to know how to dress like an academic? Deciding what to wear for work as an academic is supposed to be exciting. The academic identity exudes authority and expertise, and so it should seem obvious… Continue reading Academic style
Mahasiswa – a universal identity or a Malay masculine one?
The figure of the mahasiswa or male university student is in the news again, demanding the liberation of Malaysian academia from draconian government intervention. There is also a ‘rising star’ of student activism: 23 year old Fahmi Zainol, a young Malay man of utopian political and intellectual ambition. As the president of University of Malaya’s… Continue reading Mahasiswa – a universal identity or a Malay masculine one?
The finishing line
Of course I’ve always known that I’ll get to the finishing line sooner or later. But the actual experience of being so near it, half-running/crawling towards it, and overwhelmed by feelings of euphoria and total disbelief, exceeds the capacity of words and description. I submit my PhD thesis on the 27th of June 2014. I… Continue reading The finishing line
A Malaysian scholar remembers Stuart Hall
First published in my Malay Mail column on 27th February 2014: A great intellectual died on February 10, 2014. His name was Stuart Hall, dubbed the “godfather of multiculturalism.” As the tributes by academics made up of peers and admirers alike came flooding in, I thought about the impact of Hall’s work concerning identity and… Continue reading A Malaysian scholar remembers Stuart Hall
Scholarship on the scrap heap of an ailing higher education
First published in The Malay Mail on 29th January 2014. As someone in the business of reading, writing, and reviewing academic articles, I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. Writing academic articles is not easy and it rarely gets any easier after years, even decades (so I’m told) in academia. So when… Continue reading Scholarship on the scrap heap of an ailing higher education
Inter-religious Romance as Patina of Pluralist Harmony in Indonesian Cinema (an abstract)
I will be presenting a paper (titled above) taken from my doctoral research as part of the International Gender Studies Centre Trinity Term Seminar Series at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, on 16th May 2013. The theme of the seminar series is ‘Gender and Propaganda’ and I’ve somehow managed to design my paper in such a… Continue reading Inter-religious Romance as Patina of Pluralist Harmony in Indonesian Cinema (an abstract)
My talk: ‘Dakwah at the Cinema: Identifying Indonesia’s ‘Islamic’ film as a genre’
On Tuesday, 19th February 2012, I will be presenting a seminar on my PhD research as part of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies Seminar Series (abstract below). Religion in film is a relatively new and under-explored branch of (principally) film, cultural and area studies. Currently, the study of religious representations in cinema goes down… Continue reading My talk: ‘Dakwah at the Cinema: Identifying Indonesia’s ‘Islamic’ film as a genre’
On skodeng visual culture
Marshall McLuhan perhaps never foresaw how the global village would one day become like a Malay village where a person’s code of morality was carefully circumscribed and their private life is everybody’s business. One aspect of the online Malay village is the exchange of saliva-inducing moral tut-tutting and cruel assassination of character between internet users… Continue reading On skodeng visual culture
Alicia Izharuddin 