ASAA Early Career Prize Prize 2026

My book, 'Pursuing Morality', was awarded the Early Career Book Prize 2026 by the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA).

The Committee provided the following comments:

“Pursuing Morality is a beautifully written, deeply researched and conceptually ambitious ethnography of Plong Buddhist life in southeastern Myanmar. Based on bold fieldwork conducted in a conflict-affected region between 2015 and 2019, the book offers a richly textured account of how Buddhist Karen people understand, negotiate and practise morality in everyday life. Chambers shows that morality [thila/sīla] is not simply a Buddhist rule-system or an ethnic essence. It is an ongoing pursuit, shaped by family obligation, gendered self-making, migration, economic pressure, charismatic monks, Buddhist nationalism, armed authority and the violence of the Myanmar military state.

The committee was especially impressed by the book’s refusal of easy binaries: resistance and accommodation; Buddhism and violence; morality and corruption; tradition and change. Instead Chambers shows how Plong people navigate “multiple moral compasses” that do not always point in the same direction, and how moral agency is unevenly available across gender, age, class, ethnicity, and political position. The book is particularly strong in its attention to young women’s lives and to shifting gender relations in a world marked by insecurity and change.

Pursuing Morality also stands out for its methodological care. Chambers reflects with unusual honesty on her positionality as a white anthropologist from the global North and on the wider politics of anthropological knowledge production. The result is a work of great ethnographic depth and interdisciplinary reach. It speaks not only to anthropology and Buddhist studies, but also to scholars of gender, ethics, conflict, nationalism and contemporary Southeast Asia.”