Research Platforms' Performance Reports GA21 2015-2017 | Page 12

RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
Culture & Values
movements and civil societies form new coalitions and
challenge existing governance structures. They mobilise
their respective communities and challenge existing
institutional arrangements. Social, religious and political
leaders mobilise their followers. Identities shift, new forms
of inclusion and exclusions emerge. At the heart of these
transformative cultural changes are often contested
ideas and diverging values about human rights, freedom,
citizenship, gender, and development.
The core expertise and capabilities of this Culture and
Values cluster are the following: social and cultural change;
human rights, gender, citizenship and freedom; social
governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs);
and politics and governance. The research cluster looks into
the dynamic formation of social and cultural change, actors
and coalitions involved, and the newly emerging forms
of governance.
Associate Professor Marco Bünte
Research Cluster Members
Associate Professor Marco Bünte
(Cluster Leader)
Associate Professor Shamsul Haque
Dr Thaatchaayini Kannanatu
Dr Tan Meng Yoe
The 21st century sees a number of Asian societies in
motion. Driven by enhanced levels of globalisation and
regionalisation, Asian societies undergo rapid changes
in their social and cultural spheres. These rapid and
often multiple transformations put Asian societies
under tremendous pressures to adapt to challenges of
globalisation. Processes such as regular and irregular
migration, urbanisation, industrialisation and increasing
rural development are often highly uneven – they occur
in different locations, in different domains and often at
different speeds with different social consequences. Social
changes also shape individual, social and cultural identities.
Increasing changes lead to changing value orientations.
Norm entrepreneurs mobilise for new ideas and build
social coalitions to initiate political change. Protest
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One of the research projects under this cluster is on
‘Mediatised Religion: Online Religious Communities in
Malaysia’. The primary objective of this research project
is to examine the ways in which social media serves as a
platform for religious engagement in Malaysia. It involves
researching social networking sites like Facebook, where
new and diverse communities of believers can be easily
gathered to interact with one another.
Another ongoing research was on ‘Rights, Gender Identity
and Ethno-Religious Identity in the Malaysian Legal System
(1957 – 2016)’. This research is to determine to what extent
there is a mutually constitutive link between rights, gender
identity and ethno-religious identity within the Malaysian
legal system from 1957 to 2016. Also, the research
objectives are relevant to understanding both the normative
and social implication of ‘black letter’ laws as well as ‘soft
law’ governmental policies on the categorisation of gender
and ethnoreligious group identities in an increasingly
heterogeneous, diverse and complex Asian society.
In cooperation with the school of Arts and Social Sciences
and the German Institute of Global and Area Studies
(GIGA), the cluster organised an international workshop
on the ‘Rise of populism in Asia’. 15 participants from
Asia, Europe and the US discussed the increasing populist
mobilisation and its consequences for multiple countries
in Asia.