Heyyo, Southeast Asian youth advocates!
Ready to shake things up? The call for application for Youth Rising Creative Workshop 2025 – Southeast Asian Youth for Academic Freedom is now open.
Youth Rising is envisioned as a nexus of academic freedom and artistic freedom among young people — a creative workshop that brings together students, young scholars, and artists to explore how imagination and critical inquiry can confront repression and inspire collective action in academic spaces and in solidarity with academic communities and other stakeholders.
Across Southeast Asia, academic freedom is under increasing threat. Students and scholars alike face surveillance, censorship, militarization of campuses, political interference, and shrinking civic space. In many cases, educational institutions are no longer safe spaces for critical thinking, dissent, or inclusive dialogue.
While youth are often on the frontlines of mobilizations and actions, they are rarely centered in regional academic freedom conversations. Yet, young people — especially students — are key actors within academic communities. They experience the daily impacts of repression in classrooms and campuses, while also holding the energy, imagination, and cross-sector reach to build movements and reshape educational spaces from the ground up.
This fellowship recognizes youth not as passive recipients of education policy, but as organizers, cultural workers, and visionaries. It seeks to build their capacity, establish regional solidarity, and contribute to a long-term youth-led response to authoritarianism, inequality, and injustice in Southeast Asian education systems.
Through participatory dialogue, art-making, storytelling and content creation, the workshop seeks to reclaim campuses and classrooms as spaces of freedom, while amplifying youth voices in the broader struggle for rights, democracy, and social justice in Southeast Asia.
The camp program aims to support this ecosystem by empowering youth to participate in cross-cutting conversations and alliances for academic freedom — a form of engaged scholarship.
FULLY-FUNDED OPPORTUNITY
15 selected youth participants, aged 18-30 years old from across Southeast Asia
October 31 – November 1, 2025
Mahidol University, Salaya Campus, Thailand (about 25 km from central Bangkok)
Deadline of Application – September 26, 2025
