Milk Tea Education 🧋

We have now completed the main part of our project - the in-person 3-day workshop series in Chiang Mai, Thailand held in February 2026. It was an in-depth course that aimed to deal with all the main aspects of writing for publication as scholar-activists. In the end, 22 participants attended from right across Southeast Asia, with some meeting for the very first time. Participants came from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and even job roles, with most from the higher education sector but also some from government departments and NGOs. We believe that this mix led to very vibrant and fruitful discussions, and has initiated in-country and cross-regional networks (and friendships).  One of our participants, Dr Aaron Denison Deivasagayam, from Malaysia, shared his reflections on the workshop series: "One of the most meaningful aspects of the workshop was the opportunity to reflect on what it means to be a scholar-activist. In a time when academics in many parts of the world face in...

In November 2025 and January 2026 we ran two online sessions to prepare our 24 participants for the in-person workshops. These focused on getting to know each other as well as the basics of academic publishing. Participants then worked on their draft/skeleton articles in preparation for review by the team leaders. We believe this helped participants get a head-start before the longer workshop and to help them become more relaxed around each other.

This month, the team selected 24 participants for the project. We had almost 100 applications from brilliant scholar-activists right across Southeast Asia, so this was a really difficult task! Our project administrator has been working tirelessly to organise this process (thank you, June!) We wish we could include everyone. We hope that even those who were not selected this time will keep in touch with the project in the future. We have now sent out the news to participants and we are getting ready for the first event: our first online seminar! This will be held in November 2025 (date TBC). In this seminar we will share our motivations for starting this project, get to know each other a little better, and support participants to write a draft skeleton version of an article that will be peer reviewed before the in-person workshops in Chiang Mai on 5-7 February 2026. Part of the aim of our project is to share all our resources on this website, so that others can use them to teach about w...

  Call for participants! We are excited to announce a new project, funded by the British Academy: Human Rights Education and Activism in South-East Asia: Developing the Publication and Grant-writing Capacity of ECR Scholar-Activists in Challenging Political Times. This project aims to develop the capacity of 24 ECR ‘scholar-activists’ in the fields of human rights education and activism in South-East Asia (SEA) to write for publication, to successfully apply for research funding and to cascade this learning to other scholar-activists.   ------ Project deadline: 5 September 2025 ------ Project activities: 1. Online pre-workshop seminars (October 2025 and January 2026) 2. In-person workshops (5-7 February 2026, Chiang Mai, Thailand) 3. Post-workshop mentoring and dissemination of publications (March 2026-March 2027) ------ Project language: English. ------ Participant/country eligibility : You must be an early career researcher (ECR) who works on huma...

Writing workshops funded by the British Academy 🇹🇭 🇵🇭 🇱🇦 🇮🇩 🇲🇾 🇰🇭 🇲🇲 🇻🇳 🇹🇱 🇬🇧  In May 2025, we officially launched the project! Call for participants will be released in July 2025. Watch this space! Led by: Helen Hanna (University of Manchester, UK), Pisith Nasee (Chiang Mai University, Thailand), Chris Millora (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK), Ngamsuk Ruttanasattian (Mahidol University, Thailand) Contact: milkteaeducation@gmail.com Hosted by: Chiang Mai University Research Center for Multiculturalism and Education Policy: https://www.facebook.com/share/1Bo4Z7JHqz/