This weekly digest is a collection of news, upcoming events and other opportunities from the Faculty of Social Sciences, Lund University and the wider area, compiled for Graduate School students.
In this week’s digest:
- Cambodia-Thailand border conflict: Yesterday, today and tomorrow
- Writing and study sessions with the Academic Support Centre
- CMES Seminar: The Politics of Death in Palestine
- SASNET Lecture with Atreyee Sen: “Anger, Legitimised: Amplified Anger and its Rhetorics of Legitimation in the 21st Century”
- International Law, Genocide and the the War on Palestine
Cambodia-Thailand border conflict: Yesterday, today and tomorrow
Panel Discussion
The department’s lunch seminar series is an informal arena for our own researcher’s to present and discuss research ideas and findings. Each presenter talks for about half an hour, followed by a discusson. Feel free to bring your lunch!
Can we make sense of a seemingly senseless conflict between two neighbors? Thailand and Cambodia, two Southeast Asian countries, that at the look of it have everything to gain from peacefully coexisting, are caught up in a border conflict that has cost lives, displaced hundreds of thousands, and disrupted livelihoods on both sides of the border.
The panel will trace the over 130-year-old land dispute up to the present. We will answer questions about what is really disputed, the role of national politics in both countries, what triggered the flare-up in May 2025, and how the five-day war in July differs from previous clashes. Drawing on long-term engagement with political and social developments in Cambodia and Thailand, the panel offers grounded perspectives on the conflict and assesses what the future might hold for communities whose lives continue to be shaped by violence and animosity.
Kimhean Hok is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies, Lund University. His research focuses on contemporary Cambodian politics and governance. He is from Banteay Meanchey province, along Cambodia’s northwest border with Sa Kaeo, Thailand – now a key flashpoint in the ongoing conflict.
Ph.D. Karin Zackari is a human rights scholar specializing in Thai contemporary history, who has written about Thai nationalism and state violence. She is a researcher at the Center for East and Southeast Asian Studies in a project on academic freedom in Thailand. As a child she lived in Aranyaprathet, Sa Kaeo Province in Thailand, during the Cambodian civil war, and she was on a research trip to Thailand when the war broke out in July 2025.
Date and time: 28 October 2025 16:00 to 17:30
Location: Asia Library, Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Sölvegatan 18 B, Lund
For more information, visit this page
Writing and study sessions with the Academic Support Centre
Student Support
The Academic Support Centre arranges writing and study sessions for the University’s students each semester. You can read more about how a session works, planned dates and how to register below.
The study and writing sessions take place each Tuesday for the autumn semester. Full-day sessions are 9–16, with a lunch break from 12–13. You are welcome to attend our sessions regardless of whether you study in Swedish or English.
You should bring any relevant, study-related material along to the writing and study session. You might, for instance, bring a written assignment or thesis draft that you are currently working on (or should be working on) or texts to read in preparation for your next lecture or exam. Our language and study consultants are also available to offer their advice on how to plan your study time and put that plan into practice. After a brief introduction, you have time to work towards reaching your individual goal.
You can apply to attend our writing and study sessions by emailing us at study@stu.lu.se.
Date and time: Tuesdays, 09:00 – 16:00
Location: Genetikhuset, rooms 219–222, Sölvegatan 29B, Lund
For more information, visit this page
CMES Seminar: The Politics of Death in Palestine
Seminar
The CMES Research Seminar is the main collective seminar at the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies. LU researchers and invited national and international leading scholars present ongoing research and analyses of a broad range of exciting topics of relevance for the Middle East.
Presentation by Nina Gren, Senior Lecturer, PhD in Social Anthropology, CMES, on the politics of death in Palestine: Martyrdom and ritualcide.
Date and time: 30 October 2025 13:15 to 15:00
Location: CMES seminar room, Finngatan 16.
For more information, visit this page
SASNET Lecture with Atreyee Sen: “Anger, Legitimised: Amplified Anger and its Rhetorics of Legitimation in the 21st Century”
Lecture
Welcome to a SASNET talk with Prof. Atreyee Sen (University of Copenhagen) about amplified anger and its rhetorics of legitimation in the 21st century. This event is a collaboration with the Division of Gender Studies.
For the past decades, this world has faced exponential failures of democracy, resuscitation of dictatorships, rising gender backlash, surveillance capitalism, extractivism, protracted wars, mass killing and displacement, a pandemic, and authoritarian carceral regimes. These are merely some of the factors that has tipped the earth into what social scientists call ‘the bad, ugly Anthropocene’ – signalling that human activity has eroded the social, economic and biological frontiers of planetary life.
In this talk, Professor Atreyee Sen will bring forth a discussion on how rage has become fundamental to our contemporary human condition as the world gets more interconnected through shared senses of injustice, along with fear, hatred, paranoia, and other ‘negative affect’. She will explore how collective anger as a response to this plenitude in planetary crisis has become the defining fabric of contemporary human lives.
Whether as resistance to earthly destruction, or riling for enforced segregations, or the fury in daily exposure to death and structural inequalities, anger seeps into ‘public moods’ through news, media and activism, and animates protests, resistances and current social movements. Even the wrath of more-than-human worlds, such as climate vengeance, retaliatory floods, and cleansing wildfires, becomes integrated into this global indignation.
The presentation, which provides an overview of Atreyee Sen’s ERC Advanced Grant, will highlight how these affective landscapes create pervasive atmospheres of human rage across the global North and South. Between the ‘stuckedness’ of human life and the ‘stickiness’ of disparities, the talk will raise some issues around the global circulation of rage, which is embodied, stoked and energised in the contemporary era.
Atreyee Sen is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Over the course of her academic career in India, the UK and Denmark, Sen has published extensively, and brought critical insights to studies of gender, childhoods, poverty, urban politics and South Asian cities.
Date and time: 30 October 2025 13:15 to 15:00
Location: Department of Political Science, Room Ed367
For more information, visit this page
International Law, Genocide and the the War on Palestine
Lecture
This event features international law scholars and practitioners who are in Lund for a conference and take the opportunity to do a public event while they are here. Our panel will speak to the question of International law, Genocide, and the War on Palestine from the different perspectives of accountability, anti-imperialism, the use of AI, and the ”death” of the law against war. There will also be a Q&A.
Speakers are:
• Michael Lynk (Western University, Canada, and former UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories)
• Tor Krever (University of Cambridge)
• Mais Qandeel (University of Galway and Örebro University)
• Victor Kattan (University of Nottingham)
Moderator: Markus Gunneflo Lund University, Faculty of Law
Date and time: 3 November 2025 16:15 to 18:00
Location: Palaestra et Odeum, Paradisgatan 4, 223 50 Lund
For more information, visit this page