A panel discussion with Sanjay Reddy, Khin Zaw Win, Anshin Nayake, Sara Davis. Co-sponsored with Graduate Program for International Affairs and TCDS.

Khin Zaw Win: Burmese Independent Researcher and Activist. A trained dentist and former prison of conscious (1994-2005) for his “seditious writings” and human rights work, Mr. Khin Zaw Win has been working independently in the past two years as a development practitioner and policy writer and researcher. He advocates incremental reform and broader international economic and political engagement with Burma, instead of abrupt regime change, isolation and sanction, which differs him from the mainstream opposition movement. After witnessing first hand of the Saffron Revolution in Burma, he arrived in New York in October as a Visiting Fellow of Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

Sanjay Reddy: Assistant Professor of Economics at Barnard, Columbia University. Dr. Reddy also teaches in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where he teaches courses on world poverty and on development economics. His areas of work include development economics, international economics and economics and philosophy.

Ashin Nayaka: Burmese Buddhist monk. Dr. Nayaka is founding director of the Buddhist Missionary Society, New York and currently a visiting scholar at Department of History, Columbia University.

Sara (Meg) Davis: Executive Director, Asia Catalyst. Sara Davis (“Meg”) is a writer and human rights advocate. Her book, Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwest Borders (Columbia University Press, 2005), based on her doctoral dissertation, draws on research in Yunnan, China and Shan State, Burma into cross-border ethnic cultural and religious revival.

Tim Pachirat: Assistant Professor of Political Science and International AffairsTimothy Pachirat (Ph.D. 2008, Yale University) is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics and the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School. His research and teaching interests include comparative politics, the politics of Southeast Asia, spatial and visual politics, the sociology of domination and resistance, the political economy of dirty and dangerous work, and interpretive and ethnographic research methods. Pachirat’s work has received awards from the American Political Science Association’s Section on Qualitative Methods and from the American Political Science Association’s Labor Project. He is currently working on a book project that draws on an ethnography of immigrant labor on the kill floor of an industrialized slaughterhouse to explore how violence that is seen as both essential and repugnant to modern society is organized, disciplined, and regulated.