'A multi-sided effort': New Southeast Asian Studies minor introduced

Beginning this semester, undergraduate students will be able to declare a Southeast Asian Studies minor through the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. 

The minor includes four content courses on Southeast Asia and an optional language course at the 204 level or higher. Courses offered this semester for the minor are Music 240:Performance in Southeast Asia: Gongs, Punks, and Shadow Plays; Anthropology 375: Memory, Massacres, and Monuments in Southeast Asia; and American Studies 353: Southeast Asian North Carolina. All of these classes are also listed in the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies department.

Becky Butler, assistant director for Southeast Asian initiatives at the Carolina Asia Center, said they added the minor because of a growing interest in studying the region. 

Kayla Vu, a junior Global Studies major and design chair for the Southeast Asian Student Association said she chose her major due to her interest in Southeast Asian studies, but had limited course options. Vu is interested in taking Southeast Asian North Carolina, which Butler teaches.

Coming from Jacksonville, N.C., which she said has a sizable Vietnamese community, Vu said she did not understand the scope of Southeast Asians in North Carolina until arriving at UNC, where she befriended students with Hmong and Lao backgrounds.

“It made me realize that there are so many other Southeast Asian areas and communities in North Carolina that I wasn’t aware of," she said. "And I would love to learn more about where my peers came from and how they interact with their environment, versus how I've always known to interact with mine as a Southeast Asian."

Li-ling Hsiao, the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies department chair, said that when refugees escaped the communist regime in Northern Vietnam and came to America, a lot of them ended up settling in Greensboro, N.C.

“We’ve ended up with a lot of descendants of Vietnamese refugees in the state, and so now those second generation Vietnamese kids, they came to UNC and they wanted to learn more about their own culture, their own language, their own tradition,” she added.

The inspiration for the minor came in 2021, when the student government petitioned for more Southeast Asian language courses and faculty members, Butler said.

Around the same time, Butler said Barbara Stephenson became the new Vice Provost for Global Affairs and was interested in developing Asia-focused content. The Carolina Asia Center was simultaneously working to increasing their focus on Southeast Asia.

“We also, of course, worked with the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, since that's the department in which the minor is housed; it was really a multi-sided effort to get this off the ground,” Butler said. “But really, I think what it came down to was demonstrating that there was enough student interest to motivate something like this, and I think it's clear that there is.”

Vu said she and her friends were very excited to see the minor "finally" be introduced — she said they were sending the announcement to each other on Instagram.

The required courses for the minor will be interdisciplinary and cover topics including religion, music, geography, linguistics and history, Butler said.

The Vietnamese language courses served as the foundation for the minor, with courses from departments outside Asian and Middle Eastern Studies being added later on.

“Just learning a language is not good enough, and so we have pulled together some faculty on campus who have expertise in Southeast Asia,” Hsiao said. “And so we're able to pull all these people scattering around different departments together and put together this wonderful minor.”

Butler said Southeast Asia is an incredibly robust area with developing economies, rich histories and diverse languages.

“I think it’s special to be a 'Southeast Asianist', or part of a community of people that study Southeast Asia, because you could work on Islam in the southern Philippines and your colleague is working on remittances people are sending back to family members in Myanmar,” she added. “Totally different fields in a way, but somehow they’re still connected.”

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