Environmental Biographies of Southeast Asia: Collaborative Learning in the Field
August 25, 2025-December 21, 2025
Location: Elevator Gallery
Consider forests, rivers, paddy fields and fish ponds. These environments at once all hold multigenerational stories of care and conflict between people and place. They weave together tensions and possibilities of lives, livelihoods and ecologies in dynamic ways. This exhibition brings together environmental biographies from Chiang Mai, Thailand, and South Sulawesi, Indonesia, to tell these very stories. Undergraduate student groups from PACE 316: Environmental Governance and Peacebuilding in Spring 2025 first developed methodologies as student projects. Over Summer 2025, select students and faculty from University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Chiang Mai University, Hasanuddin University and University of Malaya learned how to conduct collaborative research in multicultural, interdisciplinary and multigenerational groups, while learning about environmental transitions in rural Southeast Asia from the ground up.
The posters from this exhibition tell stories of changing forests, livelihoods, migration, resistance and identities in their situated contexts. They also tell local stories that connect to the broader dynamics of environmental change and social relations that link disparate and distant places across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The exhibition features environmental biographies from O‘ahu and Maui about dedicated kupuna educators and environmental stewards.
This student exhibition is made possible through the support of a UH Center for Southeast Asian Studies LuceSEA Transitions grant Environment, Society, and Change; the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) Tyler Fellowship, and Entering Research and Creative Work (ERC) funding; the Matsunaga Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies; the College of Social Sciences School of Communication and Information (SCI) and Departments of Anthropology, Geography, and Environment and Political Science; the East-West Center Research Program’s Vulnerable Deltas in Southeast Asia: Climate Change, Water Pollution, and Socio-Economic Transformation research project; and the Hamilton Library. We are also incredibly grateful to our partner institutions, The Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development (RCSD), Chiang Mai University, Thailand, and the Forest and Society Research Group (FSRG) at Hasanuddin University, Indonesia, as well as the many individuals, families, and communities who shared their stories with us.
