Ambitious scientific cooperation projects with Cambodia
Since 2012, the Manusastra project has offered a "Université des Moussons", a French-language undergraduate course at the Royal University of Fine Arts of Phnom Penh (URBA) leading to a double Inalco-URBA diploma. Since 2014, Inalco's LLCER Master's program has also been relocated to URBA. Hosted by the Faculty of Archaeology at the Royal University of Fine Arts, where the most comprehensive curriculum in Khmer studies was taught, the aim is to give its students complementary tools to reappropriate the science available in the academic world on Cambodia, and more broadly on Southeast Asia, through three disciplines: history, anthropology and linguistics.
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A new cooperation agreement in December 2019 has just extended the scope of the Manusastra project to three Cambodian universities, namely the Royal University of Phnom Penh (URPP) and the National Institute of Education (INE) in addition to URBA for the next three years. The project is currently supported not only by the three Cambodian universities involved, but also by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, the French Embassy, the IRD and Inalco. Strongly supported by the IRD in recent years in terms of human resources through the provision of a VIA who is currently piloting the project at administrative level, management of the project should soon return to Cambodia, the next step in the project.
The curriculum offered by the Manusastra project has welcomed more than 400 enrollees at all levels since 2012, including 400 Cambodian students, 10 Laotian students and 1 Thai student. This research training has already enabled seven students to pursue doctoral studies in France, one at Jean-Jaurès University in Toulouse, one at Tours University and five at Inalco.
Despite Deth's premature death and the COVID 19 pandemic, the French and Cambodian teams remain highly mobilized. The 2020 Monsoon University is currently being prepared, at a distance, and follow-up is assured for Master's students.
The recently completed European GeReSH-CAM project "Governance and Emergence of Humanities Research in Cambodia" received Erasmus+ KA2 capacity-building funding from the European Union. Coordinated by Joseph Thach for Inalco, it involved the University of Latvia (UL), Lithuania's Vytautas-Magnus University, the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF) and the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), and on the Cambodian side, URBA, URPP, INE, the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Kingdom of Cambodia (MEJS), and the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts (MCBA). After co-organizing 14 workshops over three years, it led to the creation of the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire en sciences humaines et sociales, the CHaS! of which Deth was the current director. An international conference was organized to launch the center in October 2019, "Languages, cultures and identity in South-East Asia: identity and diversity". A series of monthly transdisciplinary seminars involving Cambodian and international researchers are being organized in Phnom Penh, and international collaborative research projects are being set up. These seminars should help consolidate the center's activities, promote research and create a space for collective work that should lead to collective publications in the coming years.
Isabelle Léglise
Contact: isabelle.leglise@cnrs.fr and manusastra.sedyl@inalco.fr
To go further and follow the projects:
https://www.facebook.com/projetManusastra/
https://www.facebook.com/gereshcam/
A SHS research center in Phnom Penh: steps in a long process (video to watch on Youtube)