Call for Papers: Youth Studies in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Cultures, Politics, and Public Life under Constraints — Symposium, University of Melbourne

Co-convenors

Dr Clara Siagian (University College London, c.siagian [at] ucl.ac.uk)

Dr Annisa R. Beta (University of Melbourne, annisa.beta [at] unimelb.edu.au)

Important dates

• Event date: 24 June 2026, University of Melbourne Parkville Campus, Naarm/Melbourne

• Extended abstract submission: due 6th April submitted via Google Form

• Selected abstract announced on 13th April

• Short draft (3000-4000 words inclusive of captions, figures, and references): 30 May 2026, only authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit a draft.

This hybrid symposium invites scholars working on youth cultures, politics, and public life in Southeast Asia to engage in a one-day intensive discussion on how young people living in and from Southeast Asia navigate constrained political, economic, and cultural environments across the region.

Convening early- and mid-career researchers as well as graduate students from different disciplines, the symposium fosters interdisciplinary and comparative conversations on young people as social actors living within rapidly shifting state-society relations.

Across the Southeast Asian region, young people encounter a shared landscape marked by democratic regression, economic precarity, expanding informal and gig economies, climate vulnerability, geopolitical tension, and intensifying political surveillance and suppression. At the same time, youth continue to be mobilised discursively as symbols of nationalistic futures, demographic dividends, and catalysts for revolutionary political transformation. This tension between expectation and constraint constructs how young people articulate belonging, aspiration, dissent, and everyday survival.

This symposium invites works that approach young people as active subjects embedded in cultural practices, infrastructures, and power relations, not merely as a demographic category or policy target. We welcome contributions that examine how youth produce meaning, negotiate authority, and reimagine public life and political culture through everyday practices, digital and social media cultures, artistic and creative expressions, diverse forms of activism, or institutional engagement under multiple constraints. Papers can address local case studies or multinational comparisons and draw on methodologies from sociology, geography, anthropology, political science, education, cultural studies, urban studies, media studies, development studies, and related fields.

For more details, refer here