Social Transformations in India, Myanmar, and Thailand: Volume II / Progress in Mathematics (PDF)

This book explores the multifaceted obstacles to social change that India, Myanmar and Thailand face, and ways to overcome them. With a collection of essays that identify common challenges and salient features affecting diverse communities, this volume examines topics from subnational and local perspectives across the peripheries. The book argues that identity-based divisions have created a system of oppression and political contention that have led to conflicts of different kinds, and hence serving as the common cause of different social issues. At the same time, such issues have created space for marginalized groups around the world to call for change. The volume recognizes that social transformation comes into being through an active process of deconstructing and reconstructing shared norms and ideas. The contents in this book are thus centered around two focuses: the impacts of identities and grassroots. Both of these aspects are at the heart of each country's transformations towards democracy, peace, justice, and freedom. Under this framework, the chapters cover a diverse range of common issues, such as, minority grievances, gender inequality, ethnic identity, grassroots power in alliance-making towards community peace, recovery and resilience, digital freedom, democracy assistance and communication, and bridging multiple divides. As identity-based cleavages are daily lived experiences for individuals and communities, it requires grassroots initiatives and alliances as well as democratic communication to tackle obstacles at the root. Ultimately, the book convinces readers that social transformations must begin at the individual to communal level and local to national level.

Chosein Yamahata is a Professor of Global and Area Studies at the Graduate School of Policy Studies, Aichi Gakuin University in Japan. He also teaches the Master of Arts in Asia-Pacific Studies at Thammasat University, Thailand. Dr. Yamahata is the coordinator of the Academic Diplomacy Project in bridging interdisciplinary engaged studies reaching to locals and compiling thematic volumes to provoke a new feedback and disseminate sharable concerns. He co-edited Rights and security in India, Myanmar and Thailand (2020), and Social Transformations in India, Myanmar and Thailand: Volume I - Social Political and Ecological Perspectives (2021). Dr. Yamahata is also with the Faculty of Mass Communication at Chiang Mai University, Thailand as a Visiting Professor.