Workshop on Religion and Public Policy in Southeast Asia
On January 31, Bob Hefner, CURA Director, and Bernie Ardeney-Risakotta, CURA Visiting Scholar, traveled to Georgetown University to launch the first in a series of workshops and conferences to take place over the next three years on “Religion and Public Policy in Southeast Asia.” The program is funded by the Luce Foundation; the portion under the direction of Hefner and CURA represents the American wing of an eight-country project on religion and policy in the Southeast Asia Region. The larger project is being carried out under the auspices of the Institute on Culture and Religious Studies (ICRS) at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia Dr. Dicky Sofyan is the director of the larger project; Bernie Ardeney-Risakotta is the former director of the ICRS. Katherine Marshall of the Berkley Center at Georgetown University kindly hosted the Georgetown event. Other participants in this first-stage workshop included Peter Phan and Crystal Corman of Georgetown, Charles Keyes of the University of Washington Seattle, Juliane Schober of Arizona State University, and Vivienne Angeles of LaSalle University. The next conference, in Mach 2014, will take place in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and will bring together teams of researchers and policy analysts from across Southeast Asia to address the question of how governments and policy makers are, and are not, engaging the far-reaching changes taking place in Southeast Asian nations.