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Year in Review 2020
Dear friends of the Tea Leaf Center, We don’t need to mention what a crazy year it’s been. When we last sent a newsletter, in May 2020, we were still enthusiastically transitioning our work online. The shine quickly wore off all the digital possibilities, and like many people we (Aileen and Jon) laid low and…
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Year in Review 2019
This journey that we started began as a quiet discussion on supporting local researchers. We wanted our colleagues’ voices heard, their opinions considered, and their own expertise recognized. These discussions turned into bigger ideas, that turned into research support, that became the Tea Leaf Center. For us, the Tea Leaf Center is an opportunity to…
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#TeaLeafEthics:
The rains finally died down as people trickled into Pansuriya Gallery. The group was diverse, a mix of community and academic researchers representing local and international perspectives. There were health professionals, human rights advocates, land researchers, environmental scientists, independent researchers, as well as MA and PhD students that attended. Some people came to the table…
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Who Are We Protecting?
*By an anonymous PhD student In November last year, a British PhD student – Matthew Hedges – was arrested and sentenced to life in prison, accused of spying for the British government while on a research trip in the UAE. Though he was pardoned and released a week later, the incident managed to stoke the…
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Researching While Female
I had one of my most interesting conversations about consciously manipulating gender expectations in 2015 during a research trip with a colleague. Over terrible coffee and hotel-buffet mohinga, my colleague, a fierce Kachin woman, was telling me about how she chose her clothes for an interview based on what she wanted to convey. She wore…
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Innovation: GREAT, but I have to ask…
Innovation pushes the bounds of human capability. Technology such as medical devices, communication software and applications of new methods and new techniques help us to understand the world around us. Bright and shiny is what the world of research often seems to want. In recent years, field research in Southeast Asia has seen a steady…
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Taking Off: The Tea Leaf Center in 2018
2018 was the founding year of the Tea Leaf Center. Emerging from long talks, rants of frustration, and countless daydreams, it now exists. We’re starting to do the work that we’ve been dreaming of doing, the way we think it should be done. It’s a bit scary, but the good kind of scary – like…
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Who Researches Matters
I was scrolling Twitter last week, and came across a tweet that I instantly agreed with – “Support for ethnic armed group service provision will aid federalism, say researchers.” Great! I thought. The message is finally getting through. I clicked on the link to see what report managed to get this message into headlines –…
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Built By Hand: an alternative education that changes lives and builds communities
When I first came out to the farm school in 2012, it was tucked away hidden in a small village outside of Chiang Mai, Thailand. A trade school, an agriculture training center, a living space for up-and-coming Burmese youth activists from the border regions and from within the country – NEED-Myanmar has changed quite a lot since then.…
