Elliott Prasse-Freeman on The Role of Blockchain in Rohingya Lives

Elliott talks to us about the Rohingya political situation amidst dislocation and mass violence, especially after the coup in Myanmar, and how R-Coin is a new initiative helping stateless Rohingya diaspora in Malaysia.

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Elliott Prasse-Freeman is a political anthropologist studying social movements, violence, and symbolic culture in Burma. As part of a related ongoing project on the Rohingya genocide, he is exploring novel forms of personhood and conceptions of the political as they are mediated by and generated through new technologies such as blockchain, biometric scanners, and AI.

He received his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Yale University and his Bachelors and Masters from Harvard University. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Myanmar, and currently teaches sociology and anthropology at the National University of Singapore. He has a book, titled Rights Refused: Grassroots Activism and State Violence in Myanmar (Stanford University Press) on Burmese subaltern political thought as adduced from an extended ethnography of activism and contentious politics in the country's semi-authoritarian setting.