In conversation with Dr Meredith Weiss

The Centre welcomes Professor of Political Science at SUNY Albany, Dr Meredith Weiss, for a discussion with Professor William Hurst (FAMES, University of Cambridge) on her fieldwork, research design, and the state of politics in Malaysia and Southeast Asia.

About the speaker:

Dr Meredith Weiss is Professor of Political Science and founding Director of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium. She has published widely on social mobilization and civil society, the politics of identity and development, electoral politics and parties, institutional reform, and subnational governance in Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Malaysia and Singapore. Her latest books are The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Southeast Asia (Cornell, 2020) and the co-authored Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2022). She has also edited or co-edited over a dozen volumes, most recently, Routledge Handbook of Civil and Uncivil Society in Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2023) and Putting Women Up: Promoting Gender Equality in Myanmar Politics (ISEAS, 2024). Her articles appear in Asian Studies Review, Asian Survey, Critical Asian Studies, Current Sociology, Democratization, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Democracy, Journal of Human Rights, World Politics, and other journals. Her primary current projects include collaborative studies of urban governance and public-goods delivery, of civil society in Southeast Asia, and of youth politics in Asia; and a monograph on Malaysian sociopolitical development.