Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

is the Executive Director of Penang Institute. His recent books include The Eurasian Core and its Edges: Dialogues with Wang Gungwu on the History of the World (ISEAS 2016).

316 posts

Bookstores and Our Weak Sense of Self-worth

2 min read

I shall tell you a secret. Whenever in Dublin, I actually prefer browsing through bookstores to bumming down at a public house for a piece of steak washed dow...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

Gender Relations: A Wrestle or a Dance?

2 min read

SOCIOLOGY IS THE study of how a certain society functions, and central to that ambition is the study of how different genders relate to each other in that socie...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

Nicol David: So Much Done, So Much to Do

10 min read

DATO’ NICOL DAVID was the first famous personality to be profiled by Penang Monthly. This was in February 2010, in the magazine’s third issue, in an...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

Turning isolating distance into social space

2 min read

Like people in most developing countries, Malaysians suffer automobiles not only as a necessary tool for modern living, but as a purported key driver of the e...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

Anwar Fazal: Seeing New Possibilities for Social Activism Post-Pandemic [PART TWO]

7 min read

PENANG MONTHLY CONTINUES the conversation with Penang’s most prolific social activist, Dato’ Seri Dr. Anwar Fazal, on social activism, on having a p...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

It’s been an exhilarating year

2 min read

The revamped PEM has now been around a year since the preview issue came out in September 2009. The response has been consistently good.As we expected, imme...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

How will nationalism evolve?

2 min read

The biggest trick that the nation-state concept has pulled on modern man is the proposal that there is an essential line between the external and the internal...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

The Present comes before the Past

2 min read

A friend once desperately and exasperatedly wished to know what he had been in earlier lives.“Why?“ I asked him with half a mind.“Well,&rd...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

Labour stripped down to bare essentials

2 min read

A cover on migrant workers raises a lot more questions than we can hope to answer in a monthly magazine. But it is a worthy attempt nonetheless. We really nee...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

All you hybrids, emerge from your closet

2 min read

Ethnocentrism is not the opposite of multiracialism. For some reason, we tend to suppose it to be so. The truth of the matter is, the contradistinction betwee...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

A defensive psyche is colonialism’s legacy

2 min read

It has become more and more palpable to scholars that the geography of a place, with the attendant peculiarities of terrain, climate, water supply, transport,...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

The age of cities is at hand

2 min read

Urbanisation is not a process that people in Penang think about.This is not strange, since British George Town came into being in 1786 for trading and strat...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng