A Red Shirt protester bruised and bloodied on the Bangkok streets last year. Photo by Nick Nostitz.
An academic seminar in Canberra has become a YouTube hit and brought scholarly expertise to bear on dramatic unfolding events in our region. By MARTYN PEARCE. On April 21, 2010, many of the University's best and brightest on issues in Southeast Asia gathered for a one-day seminar tackling an issue dear to their hearts ' the troubles in Thailand. At the time, the anti-government Red Shirt protests were well underway, and about to turn the streets of Bangkok into a battleground. Fittingly, the seminar called itself Thailand on the Verge . The assembled crowd of around 120 people heard presentations from Dr Peter Jackson on the nature of the Red Shirt protests, Professor Peter Warr on agricultural issues feeding into the protests and Senior Fellow Dr Andrew Walker, among others. The event may have attracted a reasonably small crowd to see it on the day, but the video that was recorded of it has broken University records. Now, just shy of a year after it was recorded, it has been watched more than 50,000 times on the University's YouTube channel. For an academic presentation, aimed at an academic audience, 50,000 is a very large number. The phenomenal success of the video suggests that well-presented, relevant material can reach well beyond University walls to an international audience hungry for fact and intelligent analysis. Surprisingly, the vast majority of viewers - by a ratio of about four to one - are from inside Thailand. Thailand on the Verge conference organiser Dr Tyrell Haberkorn says that she has been surprised by its reach into the country. ?During my recent two-month trip to Thailand I was struck by the range of people that had viewed the Thailand on the Verge video,?
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