About SISEA

SISEA – “Symbolic Inequalities at Work in Southeast Asia” is a multidisciplinary research that observes practices and imaginaries of inequality in Southeast Asia through the superimposed lens of gender, labour and ethnicity. The project aims to answer a fundamental question about the acceptance, the enforcement and sometimes, the upturning of growing structures of existential inequality in the world from a Southeast Asian standpoint.

The research intends to emphasise the many ways in which imagination and symbolic imaginaries play a fundamental role in the acceptance or transformation of unequal conditions of life and ask how inequality is thought, imagined and practiced in fast-developing societies that are otherwise advocates of equality in political and moral discourse. We envisage a detailed bottom-up analysis of how the three main social constructs of gender, labour and ethnicity are effective in creating, maintaining or dismantling inequality in specific situations of marginality in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia.

The project is funded through the PRIN scheme of the Italian Ministry of University and Research and is jointly coordinated by the University of Milano – Bicocca, L’Orientale Naples University,
Ca’ Foscari University in Venice and in cooperation with a host of Southeast Asian research institutes.