The Weight of Survival
Coming Soon…
This is the third episode in a five-part series featuring a collection of interviews recorded at the 16th International Burma Studies Conference, recently hosted by Northern Illinois University (NIU). Long regarded as the institutional heart of Burma Studies in North America—and a global hub for research on the country’s history, language, art, and society—NIU once again drew scholars, students, researchers, and practitioners from around the world. This year’s gathering offered a rich mix of presentations, forums, roundtables, and cultural exhibitions that blended academic rigor with a shared concern for Burma’s uncertain future. Organized around the theme Dealing with Legacies in Burma, participants examined the memories, histories, and relationships that continue to define the region. Against the ongoing backdrop of political repression and humanitarian crisis, the discussions carried an added weight and urgency. Anthropologists, historians, linguists, artists, political scientists, and religious scholars converged to exchange findings and consider how academic work can document, preserve, and deepen understanding of Burma’s social and cultural realities during this difficult moment. The conference also created a rare space of connection and care—an open forum at a time when such spaces inside the country have become painfully scarce. Throughout the event, Insight Myanmar recorded conversations with a wide range of attendees, each offering their own angle on Burma’s past, present, and future. Produced in collaboration with NIU’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies, this episode brings listeners into the atmosphere of the conference and introduces some of the people who continue to shape and sustain the field of Burma Studies today.
This episode features discussions with Naw Moo Moo Paw, Aye Minn, and Grace.
First up is Naw Moo Moo Paw, a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts Lowell whose research focuses on disability caused by political violence. Born into a Christian community in the Bago region in 1992, as she grew up, the area experienced heavy militarization and eventually a state of intense, continuous warfare. Because of the fighting, her brothers had to relocate for safety, while she moved to Yangon, where she earned her first degree. She began working at the British Council, a job that strengthened her English skills and opened new academic prospects.
Yet amid all her work, study, and managing social and family relationships, she began experiencing troubling symptoms: she lost weight, had severe insomnia and even entertained suicidal thoughts, though she did not understand the causes. Her professional and educational path eventually led her to pursue a master’s degree in Japan in Public Management and Policy Analysis in 2018. However, Japan was a world away from Myanmar, and the safe, quiet environment she now found herself in, ultimately allowed the long-suppressed trauma of growing up amid war to surface. Here, Naw Moo Moo Paw began recalling the experience of having seen dead bodies, witnessed forced labor and experienced the horrific toll of landmine casualties. Landmines in particular had left many in her village amputated or dead, including the father of a close friend whose loss she recalls vividly from age thirteen. Her own father survived stepping on a mine while being forced into labor by the military. In Japan, the symptoms she had been experiencing in Myanmar turned into full-blown PTSD. She was formally diagnosed and was prescribed medication as treatment that she still takes, although she tries not to rely heavily on it, preferring coping strategies grounded in optimism and intentional self-reflection.
But the challenges didn’t relent. Returning home in 2020, she found a country gripped by the pandemic. She joined the 2020 election campaign, supporting an NLD candidate, but the military coup soon shattered both the political landscape and her career prospects. Encouraged to pursue a PhD, she followed the narrow path of opportunity that appeared—one that led her to the United States, where she relocated in May 2021.
Life in the US has carried its own emotional weight. During Myanmar’s devastating third COVID wave, a close figure from her Christian community died, and her mother and some relatives were hospitalized; she struggled to balance school and work, while fear for her family only increased. Naw Moo Moo Paw felt guilty for living in safety while they faced life-threatening danger, yet she forced herself to remain steady so she could support them from afar. She sent money, coordinated generators during power outages, and arranged access to medicine, while reciprocally relying on her family’s encouragement to help manage her own mental health.
Naw Moo Moo Paw stresses that her scholarship is not about congenital disability, but about those whose bodies were changed by the same conflict that scarred her early life. She studies not only medical consequences but the political, social, and psychological worlds survivors must reconstruct. She adds that many Buddhists and Christians frame disability as bad karma or the work of a punitive god—a narrative she sees not as doctrine, but as a practical means of surviving the unbearable.
Looking to Myanmar’s future, she believes disabled people need acceptance, inclusion, and mental-health support more than they do material assistance. She points out that many are already self-sufficient, but feel marginalized by community attitudes. Naw Moo Moo Paw worries deeply about long-term trauma leading to societal breakdown and violence. Her hope is that greater awareness, community support, and empathy will create a healthier, more inclusive society, and she remains committed to contributing to that future through her work.
Aye Minn, an educational organizer from Myanmar, describes how an online university emerged after the 2021 military coup and became a large alternative learning institution. He speaks about running the university and the forces that shaped both his outlook and the society he tries to serve.
When his initiative began, COVID had disrupted schooling, and the government had also repeatedly failed to reach students in remote areas. When the coup pushed thousands of educators into the civil disobedience movement, he saw that students and teachers needed a new academic home, and the institution he helped found eventually gathered 30,000 learners and 300 faculty members, most of whom work without pay.
Aye Minn’s inspiration grew out of his childhood. Growing up in Mandalay, he saw communities rushing to help one another during floods, whether natural or deliberately caused by the government. He grew up Hindu, and speaks Hindi with his grandmother, yet he has become increasingly familiar with Buddhist village festivals, sermons, and traditions of generosity. These memories form his earliest understanding of the Buddhist term parahita, or acting for the good of others. He notes that parahita is not limited to Buddhism: he has seen Muslim, Christian, and even Jewish groups using the same term to name civic associations in Myanmar. Those examples convince him that Burmese society, despite decades of crisis, repeatedly finds ways to lift itself up.
While parahita guides much of the online university’s work, Aye Minn is equally interested in atahita—acting for one’s own good. In Burmese culture, he says, people often treat atahita as a negative trait associated with selfishness, even though the original Pāḷi texts describe self-care as a necessary precursor to helping others. In the educational resistance movement, he now observes that teachers, students, and leaders pursue both aims at once: they want to support the community, and they want pathways to improve their own careers or gain opportunities abroad. He believes it is important to foreground this reality because opportunities in Myanmar are so rare that professional recognition becomes a kind of currency more valuable than money. He says his own life illustrates the tension between parahita and atahita. He admits that burnout, mental-health struggles, and long weeks spent immobilized with his laptop show how easily self-neglect corrupts one’s balance.
One formative incident he mentions occurred during the first years after the coup. There was a surge of anger against the junta, causing many educators refuse to work with anyone connected, whether directly or indirectly, to the old system. However, he realized that exclusion contradicts the very purpose of education, and so his university eventually allowed students to enroll without revealing their identities.
Aye Minn reflects on similar initiatives in other conflict zones, such as informal education programs in Ukraine or Gaza, and notes that those efforts often receive substantial external funding. He contrasts this with Myanmar’s resistance education movement, where people who would ordinarily hold paid academic or administrative positions continue doing the same work without pay because the university has almost no financial support. He explains that many volunteers keep contributing because recognition, experience, and the chance to advance their careers carry real weight in Myanmar, where years of instability have left few paid opportunities available.
Grace, a master’s student at Florida International University specializing in Asian Studies, discusses her research on rare earth mining along the border between China and Kachin State in Myanmar. She explains that rare earth elements, while not actually rare, are critical for modern technologies, including smartphones, laptops, military equipment, and especially electric vehicles. International demand for these minerals has grown dramatically with the global shift toward renewable and alternative energy sources.
These global pressures clash with local realities in Kachin State, where chemical-based, heavy, rare earth mining has been underway for more than a decade. Grace cites recent research indicating significant health damage in communities near mining zones, particularly around Bang Hwa and Chipu. Reported impacts include skin diseases, respiratory problems, and digestive disorders, with possible kidney-related complications. Mining expanded rapidly after COVID-19 and the 2021 coup, worsening conditions in areas already destabilized by conflict.
She outlines China’s dominant role in the global rare earth market, controlling roughly 80 percent of the supply and processing capacity. Because Chinese regulations began restricting domestic extraction around 2012–2015, much of their mining operations shifted across the border into Myanmar, in areas divided among a shifting mix of Kachin forces, military-backed militias, and local armed actors, each taxing and/or regulating extraction where they exert control. Even amid the fighting between the Kachin Independence Army and the Myanmar military, China maintains rare earth supply chains by dealing directly with whichever faction controls a given site, allowing extraction. This fragmented system creates overlapping economic, political, and military pressures that shape both the functioning of the mines and the dynamics of the wider conflict. This produces an environment in which multiple actors with competing agendas—state forces, ethnic armies, foreign buyers, and local populations—interact chaotically, shaping both the conflict and the rare earth supply chain.
Chinese investors often fail to conduct proper environmental assessments and leave behind chemical waste, contributing to severe ecological and health degradation. Though the Kachin Independence Organization has some environmental regulations on paper, enforcement is inconsistent, and extractive activity often proceeds unchecked. Compensation systems are easily misused, allowing companies to pay fees instead of restoring damaged land. Between the environmental degradation and poor working conditions, local communities have attempted resistance. Civil society groups, religious organizations, and town residents collaborate on petitions and advocacy, sometimes achieving temporary successes. In places like Mansi Township, mobilization has been especially active.
Nevertheless, militarization, political uncertainty, and the economic desperation of villagers make sustained resistance difficult. Many villagers lack access to education or stable income, relying on mining not for luxury but for basic survival. Grace reflects on her own shift in perspective: she once believed mining should simply stop due to its harms, but her research revealed that livelihoods in these communities often depend on it. This dynamic mirrors the resource-curse patterns seen in parts of Africa and Latin America, making long-term solutions difficult.
She also addresses reports that U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s office has explored the possibility of sourcing rare earths from Kachin through India. Although unconfirmed, she notes that the KIO may be more receptive to buyers offering fair prices and transparency, especially given dissatisfaction with China’s exploitative practices. She believes that if foreign buyers contributed scientific research and health support, communities might benefit more meaningfully.
As a Kachin academic, Grace sees her research as part of a broader effort to decolonize Burma studies by amplifying local perspectives. She believes insiders bring knowledge of lived experiences and community priorities that outsiders may miss, contributing urgently needed documentation of marginalized groups. She closes by encouraging listeners to care for their health and maintain their passion during turbulent times.