Some of my research was recently profiled at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, where I currently work. The write up, based on an interview I gave, is a pretty good overview of the project I’m working on with a handful of colleagues in Southeast Asia, Europe, and America.

You can learn more about my project here. My colleagues and I will soon be finalizing an edited volume exploring historical memory in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thailand. In the edited collection we will also be looking at UNESCO Bangkok’s Shared Histories project.

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Comparative and International Education Research Network, organized by Dr. Matthew Thomas, at the Universtiy of Sydney. The university has a strong interest in Southeast Asia through its Sydney Southeast Asia Centre. During the event I gave two talks, one an inside look at FreshEd and the other about my Kakenhi-funded research project. Here’s the abstract on my research presentation.

Making ASEAN: Insights through comparison

Southeast Asia is building a regional community through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a multi-national institution comprised of 10-member states. ASEAN aims to build a socio-cultural community by 2020. As part of its envisioned regional community, ASEAN wants to construct a regional identity by uniting over 600 million people, which will be achieved partly through national school systems that teach shared versions of history. What does an ASEAN identity look like? Is it even possible or desirable to establish a common identity across the diverse peoples of Southeast Asia? And how would a regional identity exist alongside national-identity given the divergent memories of history? In effort to begin answering these larger questions, this presentation compares the development of UNESCO Bangkok’s Shared Histories project with Cambodia’s on-going history curriculum reform.

After the 2018 Cambodian national elections, there was much ‘Western’ media attention on the death of democracy in the small Southeast Asian nation. Here’s one exemplar piece entitled “Democracy bites the dust in Cambodia but glimmers of hope remain.” I agree that democracy as an ethos is not alive and well in Cambodia. However, the very assumption that it once was alive is problematic. Reading through the myriad op-eds and reporting, I felt historical complexity was absent (an exception being this piece). I decided to add my two-cents in a new piece published in The Diplomat. My takeaway:

Hun Sen’s electoral victory in 2018 is, therefore, more a return to the historical norm of centralized power in Cambodia than a sign of democracy’s end. Democracy has always been defined in Cambodia as nothing more than multi-party elections, just as the United Nations originally intended. (link)

New Learning Times interviewed me about FreshEd in December 2017 and just released a transcript online. You can find the full interview here. Below is an excerpt where I talk about some of the dangers of podcasting.

What is so powerful about the medium of podcasting?

Podcasts are certainly powerful, but I’m not sure they are always beneficial. Yes, they provide a new medium through which ideas can circulate. And, yes, more digital content has been created because of the medium. One of the values of FreshEd has been to provide listeners with a wide range of voices, from PhD students to public intellectuals such as David Harvey. FreshEd has helped, in some small way I believe, introduce people interested in education to new ideas. Personally, before FreshEd, I never heard of the Opt-Out Movement, thought about German right-wing extremism, or watched El Chavo del Ocho.

But, there are many dangers. Are podcasts yet another online distraction contributing to serious cognitive impairments? Are we, in some anti-Freirean way, oppressing ourselves by believing we can fill our brains with knowledge through podcasts instead of deep critical engagement with ideas? And are we learning to be capitalist consumers who accept sponsored content and advertising without question? The trouble with podcasts, in short, is that they do not allow the listeners to speak back, challenge ideas, or engage in critical discourse. It is a passive medium that may reproduce the status quo.

I’m deeply aware of these dangers and struggle everyday with navigating FreshEd through this political and ethical minefield. Some episodes of FreshEd, for instance, have used advertising and sponsored content as a way to pay the costs of running the show. However, my team and I have decided to stop these practices precisely because we don’t want FreshEd to be co-opted by powerful interests.

Moreover, we have spent the last few months discussing ways to engage listeners and focus on topics they feel are important. We have been self-critical of our Western-centric (primarily United States) focus thus far (70% of our listeners live in the USA, Canada, the UK, or Australia) and have developed a strategy for including what Raewyn Connell calls “Southern Theory.” Will this work? I don’t know. Maybe FreshEd will flop like my other ventures in 2008 and 2009. But I’m optimistic because members of the FreshEd team who, despite never being in the same room, have an energy and passion for the future.

My latest piece was just published in the Routledge International Handbook of Schools and Schooling in Asia. My chapter, entitled  “Private Tutoring in Southeast Asia:  Knowledge Economies, Positional Goods, and the History of Clientelism,” compares tutoring in Cambodia and Singapore. Whereas tutoring is typically conducted by public school teachers in Cambodia, in Singapore tutoring is big business, organized outside of mainstream schooling. The goal of the piece was to move beyond describing tutoring (as has been done countless times before) to begin theorizing it, in this case from two extreme cases. I found that the concept of positional goods and clientelism were useful when thinking about tutoring. In other words, we have to see tutoring within the rise of the global knowledge economy that differentiates one’s value based on degree, while also recognizing the specific historical context in each case. In the Cambodian case, it is the social phenomenon of clientelism — making informal payments to patrons for some sort of protection — that is very much needed to explain common tutoring practices.

My collaborative research project on historical memory in the Mekong, which is funded by a Kakenhi grant, was recently highlighted in the online e-magazine Modern Diplomacy. The author, Rattana Lao, wrote:

Is it possible that a common understanding can be reached and harmony can be fostered through a new kind of text book, new knowledge and new understanding to promote something as elusive as a regional identity?

Dr. Brehm is a little sceptical: “So long as education is organized by nation-states, history and historical memory will always promote nationalism and national identity. Everything else will be secondary or retro-fitted for the main purpose.”

My latest piece was published today in Southeast Asian Studies, the area-studies journal out of Kyoto University. In the piece, which is entitled “The Is and the Ought of Knowing: Ontological Observations on Shadow Education Research in Cambodia,” I trace the evolution of English language terms used to describe private tutoring in Cambodia.  I then detail the Khmer language terms used to describe the phenomenon. I argue that while the English language terms have stayed relatively constant over 20-years and generally describe the same practice, the Khmer language uses a range of terms, which have evolved over time, to describe a multitude of practices. This finding prompted me to critique English-language researchers (myself included!) who have limited reality to their prior understandings of it (i.e., the terms employed in the “literature”). This is a methodological critique writ large. The article is free to download, so please check it out.  Enjoy!

My new article on educational privatization in Cambodia is out. You can download the article here. The piece is a portrait of a director of a non-formal school. What propelled him to start this enterprise? How does he see his school’s value and purpose? By exploring the life and history of one person, I argue that educational privitization is not only a process of policy creation but also a social practice. Cambodia is an excellent location to explore the social practice of privatization since the country has, since the 1990s, enacted policies to strengthen public education. Case in point: I learned yesterday that next year the country will spend 3.5 percent of GDP on education. That’s huge. So why does privatization continue? My article tries to answer that.

My piece is also aimed at showing the value of what Pasi Sahlberg calls “small data“. Through an in-depth study of one individual, we can learn as much as any big data research study. In this way, my piece is a call for more ethnographic, small data educational research.

President-elect Donald Trump is not the only politician who wields power through social media. Whereas the President-elect favours early morning Twitter posts to castigate opponents, institutions and ideas with which he disagrees, Hun Sen, Cambodia’s long-standing prime minister, uses Facebook as a tool to legislate policy, propagandise his party and imprison opposition parliamentarians. Cambodia and the United States may be wholly different countries, but a look at Hun Sen’s Facebook page, the power it exerts over government and recent ‘fake news’ scandals in Cambodia offer valuable lessons for the American public as it prepares for the nation’s first Twitterer-in-Chief. (Read more)