In Brunei, agritourism is a concept that is often associated with heritage-based or nature-based tourism, especially in light of Brunei’s history with agriculture being the main mode of subsistence for rural communities. As one of Brunei’s tourism product is nature-based tourism such as places like Temburong, it naturally make sense to study how this kind of nature-based tourism could help in the livelihood of the local communities via tourism such as farm to table. To date, limited study has been carried out to explore the sustainability of this type of tourism in Brunei, the impact it has on the local communities, the challenges that small farmers are facing. These are all important questions that needs to be answered in order to improve on the tourism experience and product as well as sustain what Brunei is promoting. To achieve sustainable tourism and proper management, it is important to explore the key areas to improve and the challenges and perceptions of local farmers to ensure inclusivity of local communities.The main aim of this research is to explore the potential of agri-tourism in Brunei. The objectives of the research are to:
1. Explore the benefits of agri-tourism to the sustainability of the economy and to the livelihoods of small
farmers and their community
2. Investigate the challenges of agri-tourism to small farmers and their community
3. Identify the key areas to improve to develop agri-tourism in Brunei
The effects of tourism on aquatic environments have been mainly studied for coastal marine ecosystems such as coral reefs, but not for tropical rivers and estuaries. Brunei River nurtures mangrove forests and wild animals and plants and therefore, is one of the most important resources for tourism in Brunei. However, none of research projects monitors this aquatic environment, which may be affected by various global and local environmental changes, including the effects of increasing touristic activities. This research project aims (1) to perform qualitative research on how the environmental conditions and tourism status on Brunei River have been changed by asking tourism-related people, (2) to sort out environmental parameters that should be carefully monitored for sustainable tourism at the target sites, (3) to monitor and analyze the environmental conditions and to detect existing or potential risks of deterioration of the aquatic environment, and (4) to propose proper management strategies for maintaining sustainable tourism in Brunei River. It is expected that a role model of balancing nature conservation and tourism development will be proposed for tropical rivers through this project.
The rationale of this is to assess ecotourism development in the area using TIES (The International Ecotourism Society) guidelines in order to gauge the degree of compliance in Teraja with ecotourism principles and practices. Many ecotourism ventures are not true ecotourism because they do not abide to the principles and practices of ecotourism, which defeat the notion of Sustainable Development. Nature-based tourism carried out without the necessary safeguards often results in undesirable impacts to the environment, ecosystem and or local community.
The project continues research among the Iban of Temburong, but extends it to other Iban communities in Brunei. It is a a neglected field of studies, dominated by work and publications on the Iban of Sarawak. This research project aims to redress the balance in examining a marginal and minority population of the Iban diaspora in Brunei.
Western celebrity culture is often perceived to be synonymous with permissive and decadent moral values. This culture, which is often portrayed as a global one, do not always resonate with the authorities in non-Western contexts. The recent crackdown on the behavior of celebrities in China and India is testimony to this effort to curb perceived decay in the personal morality of celebrities and social media influencers in these two countries. In Southeast Asian Muslim societies, Muslim celebrities are increasingly expected to conform to strict Islamic religious moral codes. The policing of these celebrities come not from the state but from the public as seen from the social media comments on Muslim celebrities in Malaysia and Indonesia. This paper aims to investigate how the public projects its moral policing on these celebrities under the guise of the concept of amar makruf dan nahi mungkar, derived from Quranic verses that advocate doing things that God commanded and forbidding humans to do things that are prohibited in accordance with Islamic teachings. In addition, this paper will also examine the prevailing discourses that emerge from the comments in order to understand the beliefs and mindset of contemporary Muslims in Malaysia and Indonesia. Data, obtained from netizens’ comments on Instagram and Facebook, will be analysed using discourse analysis to identify the connections between language, religious identity and culture. The findings suggest that there is an increasingly conservative environment surrounding the public’s reactions towards these celebrities, especially in Malaysia. The public also appears to have taken over the role of the state Islamic authorities in controlling expressions of individuality and imposing a monolithic form of Islamic identity in these two countries.
This chapter examines the portrayal of the university in millennial novels, exploring its role, contemporary significance, and latent intimations. Across works such as Brandon Taylor’s Real Life, Weike Wang’s Chemistry, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, and Bunny by Mona Awad, the university plays a central role, both as setting as well as markers of identity and plot determinants. This chapter recommends a turn to the campus novel: a literary sub-genre that has long been associated with the university in fiction. Critics such as Jeffrey Williams have argued that the contemporary campus novel is no longer a standalone genre, but an amalgamation of various literary sub-genres. Existing studies have also uniformly acknowledged the genre’s decline, suggesting that perhaps the only viable future for the genre is in being fused with narratives of middle-age and workplace anxieties. However, this chapter proposes further studies into the intersection between the millennial novel and campus novel. With its consistent predilection for writing the university, it can be argued that the millennial novel is a contemporary sub-genre that has fused with the campus novel genre. Close-reading the aforementioned works by Taylor, Wang, Batuman, and Awad, this chapter finds that the university, particularly the demanding and confining environment that is the graduate school, acts as a sphere that encompasses dread and ennui – both characteristics often attributed to millennial works. The university bubble also works as a microcosm, allowing examination of millennial characters and their multitudinous encounters, interactions, and entanglements. Additionally, the university setting functions as a temporary home. This enables studies into millennial preoccupations with exile and belonging, where the university provides refuge, if only for a few short years. Interestingly, the university as proxy for home leads to both familial and romantic relationships, where complexity arises from the constant distortion of the two. By focusing on the university in the millennial novel, this chapter considers how the genre is often implicated by its relationship with juggernaut institutions – the university being one of the most prevalent and prominent.
Keywords:
The millennial novel; campus novel; university novel; university in fiction; higher education.
This proposal outlines the need for a corpus on Brunei English (CoBE). Previous works on Brunei English have relied on researchers collecting and assiduously analysing their own data, much of which have been confined to a set demographic. That is an issue in itself because any description arising from the data is based on a sub-variety of Brunei English and is, therefore, not representative of the reality of the situation on the ground. We propose the building of a large-scale corpus on Brunei English, to be collected via various means and from a variety of sources, and which will reflect the different modes and domains of text (i.e., modes: spoken and written; domains: academic, informal, formal) (see Fig. 1 under ‘Aim’). CoBE will thus be more representative of real-life Brunei English. Hitherto, no corpus on Brunei English exists, with the exception of UBDSCBE which, unfortunately, is not publicly accessible, comprised only spoken data, and was focused on English as used by UBD students. Even the largest corpus on English varieties, the ICE (International Corpus of English), which stores corpora from little known English-speaking places such as Trinidad and Tobago, makes no mention of Brunei English.
Thus, in addition to putting Brunei English on the World Englishes corpus map, CoBE will benefit those researching the linguistics of this English variety in that they will be accessing the same data when carrying out comparative studies. Furthermore, as the English Studies programme will be introducing two new modules namely AN-4334 Corpus Linguistics and AN-4335 Contrastive Linguistics. CoBE will function as the former module’s main learning tool and resource and students will put theory to practice by carrying out investigations using CoBE whilst the latter will utilise CoBE to gain access to the English variety used in Brunei for contrastive purposes with other languages.
This project aims to investigate the notion of religiosity in the Bruneian context with the overarching aim being to investigate earlier claims of a link between language and religion. While Malay is the sanctioned official language and Brunei Malay traditionally acknowledged as the nation’s lingua franca, the current language situation in Brunei points to an active shift in motion with a growing preference for the use of English amongst the young Bruneians. Given that the religious domain has been most rigid in resisting English infiltration, questions are now being raised as to whether the increasing English-proclivity of the young Bruneian Malays has a direct bearing on their percept of the Muslim identity and acts of religiosity. While language use and preference are the main variable of interest, other social variables are also factored into the investigation. These variables include age, gender, educational background, and the type of schooling, and also the psychological variable of worldview.
The project will be a 2-year collaboration between FASS and SOASCIS. The linguistic aspect of this project will be overseen by Dr. Salbrina of FASS. Islam will be the focus of both SOASCIS’ Dr. Majdey and Dr. Amali, who each will have specific roles; Dr. Amali will assist on the research design, and the quantitative and psychological aspects, while Dr Majdey’s focus will be on governance and policy and the interlink between these aspects and the linguistic findings.
This project discusses the artistic and cultural exchanges in the context of trade, migrations, and circulation of knowledge across the South China Sea. It examines artistic experience and its role in the transmission of knowledge, in the adaptation of transcultural discourses, and in the formation / transformation of cultural identities. The arts in Southeast Asia have been analysed and studied under the perspective of isolated geographies and cultural identities and only sporadically understood under the context of a global art history. Throughout the centuries, the South China Sea served as a platform for intercultural dialogue not only for surrounding cultures but also for distinct European powers with distinctive modes of cultural interaction. The understanding of the arts in Southeast Asia in a global perspective requires a fundamental reconceptualisation of the objects, material culture, themes, and methods under a "de-centralized†art history crossing the historical and the contemporary.
The UNESCO 1972 World Heritage Convention, ratified by Brunei Darussalam in 2011, recognises the universal value of cultural heritage momuments, groups of buildings, and historical sites from the point of view of cultural history, design, science and technology. Historical buildings are not simply human made structures, but rather an expression of cultural identities, principles of governance, religious beliefs, and also stands as a carrier of collective memories. An architectural heritage should be interpreted as an ‘artefact’ in relation to the formative process of cultural expressions.
This research project intends to understand the cultural, stylistic and historical significance of architectural heritage in Brunei Darussalam in order to ensure its safeguarding and sustainability. For this project we focus on the use of digital technologies to support the surveying and archival analysis of architectural heritage in Brunei Darussalam. Through the methods of digital humanities, this project endeavour is focused on the documentation (geometric, architectural, historical) through 2D and 3D drawings, creating digital and interactive maps for geo-spatial, contextual, and phenomenological navigation to locate architectural heritage. This project aims to make an inventory of architectural heritage in Brunei and use digital humanities to create an interactive and open access platform designed for education, conservation, cultural management, safeguarding awareness, social responsibility, and tourism development.
Over the last decades, in tandem with the fast growing creative economy and a better understanding of the economic, social and cultural impact of the CCI, many universities have been establishing tailored academic programmes, faculties, schools and institutes, to respond to a demand for creative workforce. However, with a growing number of technical tools made available, the democratisation of knowledge (through online tutorials / how to), and the informal nature of the CCI ecologies some of the questions that can be raised are: what is the employment rate of creative graduates with a related job position? How are higher education institutions responding to employers needs? Are creative employers preferring to employ candidates with a CCI related degree or anyone with technical skill / experience will do?
Using a range of cases drawn from the analysis of knowledge production and consumption in and on Southeast Asia, this book illustrates the various ways scholarship may be simultaneously and fundamentally political. It builds upon, and extends, the arguments developed in my recently published book Power and Knowledge in Southeast Asia: State and Scholars in Indonesia and the Philippines (Curaming 2020, Routledge). By underscoring the power of scholars and scholarship, rather than their supposed neutral or antithetical relationship with politics, this proposed book argues for the need to re-orient progressive scholarship away from the usual intellectualist critique, towards the mapping out of the power relations that underpin knowledge production and actual consumption. The reason for this lies in the need to lessen the chance of scholarship, including progressive ones, being misused by the already powerful and jeopardize in the process the interests of the unsuspecting public. This alternative approach entails pushing, rather than taming, the logic of the analysis of power/knowledge to its conclusion. That is, regardless of empirical accuracy, theoretical salience, analytic cogency and methodological soundness, a scholarly output is enabled, validated, perceived and used within the matrices of power relations, which include the field of scholarship itself. Thus, it cannot but be politically implicated and must be taken and analysed as such. and it is just the question of whose politics it supports: leftist, rightists, centrist, or itself.
This book project analyzes an iconic episode in the history of the Philippines and Mindanao, in particular, the Jabidah massacre, through the analytic frames of history, memory and heritage. Closely related and often conveniently differentiated, history, memory and heritage represent the evolving and expanding approaches to and conceptions and uses of past phenomena. At the same time, they signify the different ways aspects of the past and present are conceived or concealed for a supposedly better or grander future. They, in short, are among the various names through which politics are played out in disguise. They are also frames through which politics may be subtly but more productively examined.
This book examines the possible reasons and the different temporal and positional standpoints that enabled the event to be understood, denied or claimed by groups or individuals as a historical event. It illuminates why the tag ‘history’ matters to various stakeholders and how and why the topography of memory of this event had since then been uneven, at times forgotten, and then remembered, by whom, through what mediums, and in what contexts. The authors of this book will scrutinize the discursive regimes and socio-political and material contexts that facilitated the gradual transformation of memories of this event into a kind of a cultural artifact that forms part of the heritage of struggle among the Muslims and non-Muslims in the Philippines. Whether as history, or memory or heritage, political interests among various stakeholders underpin the various framings of the Jabidah massacre. This book uncovers the ways in which these politics enter into the realms of history-writing, memory-making and heritage-construction about the Jabidah massacre. Our angle of vision is directed to not only exposing the implicit politics but also how the use of different names or conceptual frames allows the sinister side of politics to be concealed. An important question will be raised and addressed: what roles do the writing, memory-making, and monumentalizing of the past play in support of unscrupulous politics?
Oil’s integral role in the shaping of modern Brunei demands that contemporary local literature and other cultural forms be examined under a petrocritical lens. This project seeks to examine how the extraction, production and consumption of fossil fuels mediates perceptions and experiences of the natural environment and national identity within an increasingly climate-conscious world. In contrast to narratives of other petrocultures characterised by political violence, economic instability and environmental degradation, fiction and other cultural forms from Brunei appear to be more ambivalent in their portrayals of energy, environment and national identity. On the one hand, the burgeoning of nationalistic novels post-independence, for example, can be seen as one of the products of a booming oil economy that helped pave the way for the nation’s independence in the first place. On the other, there is also growing realization of the downsides to being fossil fuel-dependent, such as environmental degradation, climate change and economic volatility that threaten national prosperity, identity and even human existence. How does such tension appear in Bruneian narratives? For one, the postmodernist short stories written by Mussidi illustrate the submersion of the human underneath the abstraction, delocalizing and globalising of various incomprehensible infrastructures, systems and networks shaped by petrocapitalism. In recent years, this challenge has also resulted in the imagining of alternate visions of the nation, which can be seen in Amir Falique’s The Forlorn Adventure set in a distant future, and Aamton Alias’s The Bunian Conspiracy series set partially in another dimension. The former imagines a booming, futuristic Brunei, thus showing a techno-utopian vision of the local petroculture. In the latter novel, a battle over the land ensues between humans and spirits that highlights issues of multispecies justice. These stories of alternate Bruneis reveal the challenges posed in writing from within a fossil-fuelled nation.
Stigmatisation of mental health problems and those undertaking mental health medication in Brunei is still prevalent. While the formal efforts are merely exclusive to involving specific segment of audiences, popular culture products have been more convivial, engaging, and able to embrace audiences across social hierarchies. The candidates who are going to work on this study shall examine and interrogate the performative benefits of those products.
Migrant workers are the vulnerable social class in Brunei, even though they contribute significantly to the country's labour force. Their presence outside welfare schemes, disconnection from family back home, social distance due to differences in cultural identity, and lack of access to physical and mental health services have largely contributed to the 'biographical disruption' of them as a human being. This project aims to interrogate the implication of these disruptions on their overall wellbeing and further creative inter-subjectivity in governing resilience.
Tik Tok, a video-sharing social networking service, took the world by storm. With an existing high social media penetration, Brunei Darussalam has further witnessed the explosion in the number of social media users signing up to Tik Tok. Despite being lauded as a global viral phenomenon and the growing (and sudden) interest in this social media platform locally, there has been a lack of research conducted on Bruneians Tik Tok use. Hence, this research aims to understand the reasons behind this growing interest and capture the nuances and complexities in Tik Tokers' use and experience in the country. It seeks to unpack the different layers of social processes and practices happening via the app's everyday use. It investigates social connectivity, identity formation and performativity at both the individual and societal levels, and everyday conflicts and negotiation processes manifested via different social practices, including the creative sharing of music videos, social connectivity, self-performativity, micro-influencing, and advocating social justice and grassroots activism. This research will provide researchers and relevant stakeholders with the current local Tik Tok use and engagements and the social practices that are locally contextualised, which is hoped to springboard further research on Tik Tok in Brunei Darussalam.
This research investigates the forms of discursive resources the Muslim youths consume, the content they create that reflects/exhibits their cosmopolitanism dispositions and the forms of Muslim cosmopolitanism present among the digitally mediated young Muslims in Brunei.
This research examines young people’s individual and collective agency in achieving national development. It investigates their civic engagements, social entrepreneurship, and the socio-cultural parameters they are currently working with, which could have fostered or hindered their agencies.
Ongoing.
Ongoing
Ongoing
4 key research questions:
1. What concerns about anthropogenic climate change are revealed through how
the media in the UK and the Malay World framed the Paris Agreement?
2. To what degree are the three main frameworks for responding to climate change,
catastrophism, gradualism and scepticism, revealed in this corpus?
3. Did the respective reporting of the Paris Agreement lead to any changes in
government climate policy in the countries covered in the project over a
timeframe of 6 months?
4. How can the project findings assist His Majesty’s Government with respect to
future policy trajectories related to national and international climate change
commitments and Wawasan 2035 in Brunei Darussalam?
This project compares and contrasts the languages and peoples of two large islands of insular Southeast Asia, Borneo and Mindanao, focussing on multilingualism, and on interactions within and between ethnolinguistic communities. Whilst there are comparisons to be made using binary polarities e.g. coastal vs interior, indigenous vs immigrant, it is hoped that this project can break new ground by going beyond such simplistic frameworks in order to show that the region can be a locus for development of new theoretical and methodolgical approaches that are locally derived, not imported from elsewhere in the world.
Translanguaging (Garcia & Li Wei 2014) is an alternative term for language mixing, language alternation or code switching, more appropriate to multilingual insular Southeast Asia. Identity projection is how communities and individuals view themelves and wish to be viewed by others. Identity negotiation is relevant in contexts where minority groups are part of larger polities and may thus feel that they have to subsume, or even conceal, their identity, language and culture. This is applicable to Mindanao as part of the Philippines governed from Manila, and to Sabah, Sarawak and Kalimantan in Borneo, ruled from Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta respectively. Brunei Darussalam is the only independent polity not controlled from outside.
The present project intends to explore the use of English in the professional world in China. In contrast to the use of English in Brunei, one of the dominant themes of the literature on language in China is the belief that English, particularly its spoken form, plays a limited role in the lives of the country’s mainly Chinese-speaking population. For this reason, it is argued, there is no societal basis for the development of Chinese English. One of the limitations of this argument is that it is based on expert opinion rather than empirical evidence about the nature and extent of English use in the lives of China’s educated people. This project aims to examine the results of a survey involving about 2,500 English users in China which seeks to generate much-needed baseline data about patterns of language choice and use in one centrally important yet overlooked domain: the professional workplace. Its findings may indicate the importance of English use in the workplace of China’s professionals, and in-depth analysis and comparison of the findings will be conducted in relation to English use in other EFL/ESL nations, including Brunei, as reported in previous literature. The project will hopefully provide significant implications for English education in China as well as other EFL/ESL nations.
With more than 50 years’ development, the study on foreign language learning anxiety (FLLA) still remains a popular research topic among scholars in western countries. Though at its initial stage of development in China, FLLA has caught increasing attention from Chinese researchers in recent years, and it has been frequently discussed in journal and newspaper articles. FLLA is believed to be one important reason for students’ “dumb Englishâ€. Considering the paucity of monographs on FLLA in China, this project attempts to bridge the gap. The project reviews and discusses previous literature and current status and major issues centering on FLLA worldwide, and explores FLLA in China making use of innovative triangulated research methodology combining both quantitative and qualitative methods, namely, questionnaire surveys, focused interviews, and classroom observations. The project also highlights the significance and implications of the conclusions drawn, and then envisions the future of FLLA research globally with a particular focus on China. Readers can derive from this project the latest developments and issues concerning FLLA, the reasons leading to FLLA and the verified effective strategies alleviating such anxiety, which will be of great interest and benefit to them.
The 2022 Southeast Asia Climate Outlook Report identified flooding as the most serious impact of climate change according to respondents of the survey (Seah et. al. 2022). In the same report, flooding is considered to pose greater threat to communities living in metropolitan or urban areas. Torti (2012) the implications of rising flood events in the region on the resilience of health systems citing contexts of complex disasters—the cooccurrence of disaster events. Alejandria & Smith (2019) and Elinoff & Vaughan (2021) conducted studies that highlighted the susceptibility of the region to hazards, which is worsened by ineffective governance systems. Galliard (2021), Remes & Horowitz (2021), Lizarralde (2021), and Kelman (2020) discuss the concept of disasters being "unnatural," emphasizing the need for a thorough assessment of policies and governance related to various types of hazards.Between 2020-2022, while the COVID-19 peaked, record-breaking flooding events were recorded in several urban areas including in Brunei-Muara, Kalimantan, Sabah, and Palawan. These areas are under the subregion known as the Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines- East Asean Growth Area (BIMP-EAGA) which declared in its Vision 2025 that the cluster aims at “making cities resilient and more liveable through integrated urban development and environmental planning.” Aligning to this goal, this paper aims to explore the knowledge, attitude, and practices of vulnerable communities in the BIMP-EAGA subregion on disaster preparedness, specifically in relation to flooding as a hazard. Through this, this study may contribute to the documentation of localized understanding of climate changes impacts and the relevant adaptation and mitigation approaches that could be amplified towards policy-making. This study will employ qualitative methods of interviews, photo elicitation, and focus group discussions to document modalities of disaster preparedness among members of selected urban communities in the sub-region of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines (BIMP). Vulnerable members of affected urban communities will be invited to discuss their knowledge, attitudes, and practices towards flooding. A gendered approach will also be employed in the selection of key informants following current discourse in literature that highlights the differentiated roles and vulnerability of individuals based on their gender.
This is a collaborative project led by Prof Roger Barnard, Waikato University and Zuwati Hashim, Universiti Malaya, that investigates the status, challenges and directions of the use of English as a medium of instruction in various Southeast Asian nations. The project will lead to a publication of a volume by Taylor & Francis.