Through Other Eyes
Coming Soon…
This episode opens the first of a three-part series highlighting the Decolonizing Southeast Asian Studies Conference at Chiang Mai University. The gathering brought together scholars, activists, and cultural workers from across the region to explore how colonial legacies continue to shape scholarship, storytelling, and identity in Southeast Asia. Rather than treating these as abstract issues, the conversations revealed lived, personal, and often emotional dimensions of what it means to reclaim narrative power. In this opening episode, we hear from Jules Yim and Jochem van den Boogert, whose very different yet complementary approaches capture the heart of the conference: a search for more grounded, inclusive, and self-determined ways of knowing and expressing the region’s stories.
Jules Yim approaches decolonization not as a fixed theory but as a living, breathing practice rooted in creative expression and community care. She reflects on how art, performance, and storytelling can unsettle inherited frameworks that define Southeast Asia through colonial or Western lenses. Rather than treating decolonization as a distant academic pursuit, she insists that it happens in the everyday acts of reclaiming voice, centering local experience, and refusing imposed hierarchies of value.
Part of that vision emerges through what Jules calls “seapunk.” As she puts it, “seapunk as a movement has a lowercase ‘s,’ at least in my vision. I would like seapunk to be in the same league as cyberpunk, steampunk, and silkpunk.” It’s a framework that fuses cultural identity, rebellion, and creativity—resisting neat categorization. “When we refer to punk specifically, we're referring to the outsider. We're referring to the non-mainstream. We are referring to the small, the ungovernable… the adaptability and the unbotheredness and unseriousness of punk.” For Jules, this playful, irreverent energy opens space for experimentation and challenges the authority of rigid systems—be they political, aesthetic, or academic.
At the conference, Jules described how cultural work becomes a space of resistance, contrasting the state-backed, mass-produced Korean Wave of pop culture with smaller, independent creative movements that thrive on informality, collaboration, and community. “Look at the Korean wave of pop culture,” she noted. “It’s government backed and manufactured.” By contrast, she highlights the value of grassroots creativity, which keeps artistic practice connected to lived experience and grounded authenticity. These independent efforts, she explains, preserve the unruly spirit of art and community, embodying the kind of ungovernable creativity that decolonization depends on.
Her reflections often turn toward possibility, and a sense of creative optimism that ties directly to her broader philosophy: that decolonization, at its most alive, happens through imagination. For Jules, it is not merely critique but creation—an insistence on building new worlds through art, solidarity, and collective dreaming.
Another key part of the seapunk movement is that its creative process is grounded in collaboration. Whether through theatre, visual art, or community-based projects, Jules emphasizes co-creation as a way of breaking down the colonial dynamic between observer and observed. And for her, this ethos extends beyond art— it is an ethic of relationship, of listening deeply and honoring the multiplicity of voices that make up the region. She highlights how artists and cultural workers in postcolonial societies constantly negotiate between inherited systems and emerging possibilities, finding ways to transform wounds into wisdom.
Jules also challenges the notion that decolonization must follow academic or policy frameworks. Instead, she locates it in acts of care and mutual recognition: sharing meals, sustaining traditions, and creating spaces where people can simply be. She calls this a tender, care-centered practice, that sees decolonization not as struggle alone but as repair. Her message is that to reclaim history and identity, Southeast Asians must also reclaim joy and imagination. This, she suggests, is how one can begin to move beyond colonial scripts and into stories of self-determination.
Jochem van den Boogert enters the conversation from a historical and analytical perspective, examining how colonial and Cold War frameworks continue to shape the production of knowledge about Southeast Asia. He reflects on how the field of Southeast Asian studies itself was constructed within geopolitical agendas that often marginalized local perspectives. For Jochem, decolonizing this field requires a deep rethinking of its foundations—not merely adding more voices, but questioning the very assumptions that underpin how we define and study the region. “The main task of decolonizing Southeast Asian Studies has to do with getting a good grasp of that framework," he says, "and only then we can see how deep the rabbit hole really is, and then we can come up with alternative explanations and so on.” In other words, decolonization begins with awareness—understanding the systems that shape knowledge before attempting to build something new.
Jochem’s academic research delves deeply into Javanese Islam, where he examines how belief and practice coexist within hybrid and evolving cultural forms. For example, he explains that what is often labeled as “syncretic Javanese Islam” reveals a continuity of lived experience rather than contradiction. “There is a full circle there for me,” he says, “that Javanese Islam—what we describe as syncretic Javanese Islam—if you start looking at it as a set of practices, then it actually makes sense, because you can combine practices, and it doesn't matter what the beliefs are behind those practices, it's about the practices.” He further elaborates that such combinations demonstrate how communities negotiate faith through daily life, where rituals and customs interact fluidly with shifting social and historical contexts. This approach encapsulates his broader view of decolonization: not as purifying identity, but as understanding coherence within multiplicity—how Southeast Asia’s cultural complexity makes sense when viewed through action and relationship rather than rigid belief systems.
He contrasts this understanding with his observations on Buddhism in Burma, noting that the patterns he identifies in Javanese Islam—of negotiation, coexistence, and layered meaning—are also visible there. In both cases, he argues, what might appear as contradictions from an outsider’s lens actually reveal the same underlying dynamics: local communities adapting inherited frameworks to the realities of everyday life. Whether it is the integration of Islamic and animist traditions in Java or the interplay between orthodox monastic Buddhism and popular spirit practices in Burma, Jochem sees a shared structure. Both contexts demonstrate that Southeast Asian religions absorb and reinterpret multiple truths at once, showing flexibility rather than fragmentation. This continuity, he emphasizes, reflects how belief across the region is shaped less by fixed ideology than by relational practice and lived experience.
Drawing on his research, Jochem explores the ways colonial archives, academic institutions, and even language have influenced what counts as legitimate knowledge. He points out that much of what passes for objective history in the region is filtered through external lenses, often privileging state or colonial narratives over grassroots experiences. This creates a hierarchy of knowledge where certain forms of knowing—indigenous, oral, or experiential—are undervalued or ignored. Jochem urges a return to what he calls epistemic humility: recognizing that understanding Southeast Asia means listening to its people, not speaking for them.
He also goes on to consider the personal dimensions of decolonization, sharing his own journey of confronting privilege and positionality within academia, and acknowledging how easy it is to reproduce the very structures one hopes to dismantle. He emphasizes that decolonization is not about guilt or purity, but about accountability and transformation. It requires scholars and institutions alike to question whose interests their work serves and to actively cultivate alternative pathways for knowledge-making.
One of Jochem’s key insights is the need to think relationally. Decolonizing Southeast Asian studies, he argues, is inseparable from decolonizing other regions and disciplines—it is a global project of rebalancing power and perspective. He draws connections between historical processes of colonization and present-day inequalities, from extractive economies to intellectual dependency. In doing so, he invites listeners to see decolonization not as nostalgia or return, but as forward motion: a collective reimagining of the future.