What can the history of Islamic Singapore teach us about one of the most important eras of Indian Ocean connectivity? And what do Islamic traditions in Southeast Asia reveal about everyday ethics for living responsibly on a damaged planet and navigating our relationship with the more-than-human world?

These are some of the questions Teren Sevea, the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard Divinity School, explores in his research. Sevea recently completed his residency as a Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Southeast Asia at APARC. A scholar of Islam and Muslim societies in South and Southeast Asia, he investigates the region’s distinctive Islamic practices and intellectual traditions, revealing both its centrality to the study of Islam and the reasons it has often been marginalized within the field, despite its vast Muslim populations.

We spoke with Sevea about his work and fellowship experience at APARC. The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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Could you describe your research briefly?

Very briefly, I’m close to finishing a monograph on Islamic Singapore and the Sufi networks that connected this port city to Muslim and non-Muslim communities across the Indian Ocean world, from its revival as a British port right up to the present. At the same time, I’m developing a second project on land, extraction, and natural resources, where I look at how multispecies religious worlds – which include animals, trees, waters, and spirits – offer different ways of thinking about ethics, vulnerability, and what it means to live through times of climate crisis.

What initially drew you to these topics, and how did you develop your methods?

I’m trained in history and anthropology, and these projects really emerged from a worry that the histories I was reading – and sometimes writing – were too narrow. By focusing on certain texts, elites, and official archives, these histories risked overlooking the working-class believers, community‑based scholars, and the graves, ruins, trees, animals, and waters that sustain devotional life. So my methods have become necessarily interdisciplinary and site‑centered. I read multilingual texts and study official documents and elites, but also sit at shrines, in cemeteries, on coastal edges, and in plantations, listening to oral traditions, dreams, and visions, and paying close attention to the research practices of community‑based scholars and caretakers of the landscapes I study.

In my project on multispecies religious worlds, I’ve tried to extend this approach to track how communities’ accounts of charismatic animals, trees, groves, rocks, and islands help us think about ecological responsibility in an age of rapid development, industrial expansion, climate catastrophe, and faith in technological “fixes.” This has pushed me to learn from interviews, environmental histories, flood narratives, and what I have called interspecies communities.

What challenges have you encountered in studying this topic?

One of the challenges is that the histories I study are often deliberately forgotten or actively erased. Graves are relocated or demolished, ruins are converted into “useful” secular spaces, interspecies communities are displaced by development, and the archives of working‑class believers and community‑based scholars are fragile and dispersed. In certain Southeast Asian settings, the practices and sites I study have also been treated as superstitious or as “not really Islam,” which shapes how they are documented – or not documented – both bureaucratically and academically.

Another challenge is a methodological one. Much of my work relies on community‑based scholarship, popular histories, oral traditions, dreams, visions, and other stories that are supposedly not easily translatable into standard scholarly categories. The question for me, though, has not been whether to “believe” them or not, but how to learn from them. How do we, for instance, write histories that take seriously trees that bleed and overturn bulldozers, or animal saints and ancestors who enforce ethical codes, without reducing them to fantastical allegory on the one hand or romanticizing them on the other?

Finally, there is the challenge of working across scales. I am always moving between very local sites across Southeast Asia – graveyards, mangrove forests, crocodile ponds, palm oil estates – and global processes: colonial hunting regimes, plantation capitalism, petrochemical infrastructures, climate departure, and technocratic fantasies of overcoming the climate crisis. Holding these together, while remaining grounded in the voices of community‑based scholars, caretakers of these sites, and devotional communities, is demanding but, I think, necessary.

How has your time at APARC supported your research?

My fellowship at APARC has really allowed me to place Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia much more firmly within broader conversations on Asia and the Pacific. It has given me the time and space to finish my monograph on Islamic Singapore, while also thinking seriously about how questions of land, extraction, and resource futures in Southeast Asia resonate with debates across the region. Practically, APARC has given me access to an extraordinary community of scholars working on politics, economics, demography, human rights, political and comparative sociology, social movements, globalization, and political economy, as well as climate, energy, migration, and religion.

Conversations here have sharpened my thinking about technofixes and “green developmentalism” – from Singapore’s petrochemical complexes and reclaimed islands to the shifting of Indonesia’s capital to East Kalimantan – and about how to foreground vulnerability and multispecies responsibility in these discussions. It has also pushed me to reframe my materials for different audiences: not only historians of Islam or Southeast Asia, but scholars of climate, religion, environment, and contemporary Asia more broadly, who are grappling with similar questions from very different sites and through very different approaches.

Discussions with APARC colleagues I have learned from have moved across so many themes: the ethics of representing vulnerable communities in climate research, the politics of palm oil and coal, how to think about interspecies responsibility alongside state-led sustainability agendas, but also migration and development, transnationalism and diaspora, labor and governance, care work and health, children and youth, legacies of the 1947 Partition of South Asia, Singapore’s governance, the state of higher education and its pressures, and the precarious lives of migrant and transient workers in Southeast Asia. We also talked a lot about the Bay Area itself as a site in its own right.

Many of these exchanges have unfolded in multilingual conversations that drift very naturally between scholarship and everyday life. That has reminded me how tightly intellectual and everyday life are braided together. It has been a real privilege to be in a community where so many people are thinking about overlapping questions of environment, religion, political economy, migration, and social change in Asia, and to learn from students who bring their own experiences – from Jakarta’s and Karachi’s floods to Singapore’s “garden city” – into the room. In many ways, being here has felt like a truly Asian experience, but one unfolding in the Bay Area.

Have you discovered anything surprising while you were here?

What has surprised me most is how deeply these seemingly “local” stories I work with – about environments in maritime Southeast Asia – have resonated with scholars here who focus on very different places and issues. Colleagues and students have generously responded by sharing their own “tree stories,” “animal stories,” flood memories, or accounts of sacred animals and groves from other parts of Asia and beyond.

I have also been struck by how quickly conversations here turn to technofixes: mechanical trees, negative‑emissions technologies, desalination plants, and “smart” eco‑cities. Encountering these discussions up close, within a community that is rigorously engaged with policy and practice, has sharpened my sense that there is a real need to tell other kinds of stories: stories that foreground vulnerability as situated and context-specific, that ask whose futures are being secured or sacrificed, and that insist on multispecies response‑ability rather than relying only on technological rescue. Those exchanges have been some of the most intellectually and personally rewarding moments of my time at APARC and Stanford.

Living in the Bay Area has also opened up new dimensions of my research. It has enriched my work on anti-colonial, revolutionary, left‑wing connections between Singapore, Java, Burma, and the Bay Area itself. I had not expected, before coming here, to be pursuing research at religious sites in the Bay Area as part of this project. 

What is your advice to young scholars in your field?

I doubt I am one to offer advice – I am mostly in the business of receiving it. But if pressed, I might say a few things.

Firstly, try to listen very carefully to the people and places you work with, including the non-human ones. Let scholars from the communities you study, their caretakers, storytellers, animals, trees, and waters unsettle your concepts and teach you more than you expected to learn. For those working on religion and ecology, it helps to be suspicious of ready‑made binaries – monotheism versus “animism” or “nature worship,” religion versus environment, indigenous versus cosmopolitan – that flatten lifeworlds grounded in multispecies relatedness and kinship.

Secondly, consider taking communities’ histories, oral traditions, dreams, and visions seriously as forms of knowledge and research practice, even when they do not sit easily within disciplinary expectations. At the same time, be reflexive about your own position, your archives, and your responsibilities to the communities you write about, and be rigorous about how you document, interpret, and present those materials.

Thirdly – and this I can say with a bit more certainty – do not be afraid of interdisciplinarity. To understand Islamic Singapore, charismatic animals, or climate vulnerability in Jakarta and Karachi, I have needed history, anthropology, religious studies, environmental humanities, and sometimes hydrology, forestry, and energy politics. Let the questions you ask guide you across disciplinary lines, and be willing to speak to area studies and to broader debates on politics, environment, and society in Asia and beyond.

Rapid advancements in digital health — spanning technologies like telemedicine, personalized digital nudges, and large language models — present new possibilities for addressing persistent problems in healthcare access, cost, and quality. Yet there is an urgent need for effective strategies to ensure digital health innovations improve healthcare delivery and health outcomes benefiting underserved populations especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

A new viewpoint paper published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research presents an analytic framework for evaluating the foundations of digital health innovations. Focusing on the digital health landscape in LMICs in South and Southeast Asia, the paper’s co-authors provide actionable recommendations for tailoring and implementing digital health solutions across diverse global health settings.

The co-authors include Siyan Yi, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore’s School of Public Health and a former postdoctoral fellow with the Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) at Shorenstein APARC; Stanford health economist Karen Eggleston, the director of AHPP; Kochukoshy Cheruvettolil, former senior strategy officer with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Digital Health and Artificial Intelligence division; Kiran Gopal Vaska of the National Health Authority, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in New Delhi, India; and several collaborators from Stanford’s School of Medicine, among others.

Citing the advantages of a “human-in-the-loop” approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI) — a collaborative approach that integrates human input and expertise into the lifecycle of machine learning and AI systems — the co-authors emphasize the potential benefits of a “researcher-in-the-loop” approach to digital health innovations in LMICs. Their collaboration for this paper was conceived during a panel discussion on digital health innovation featuring Cheruvettolil, Vaska, and Yi. Hosted by AHPP in October 2023, this event was part of APARC’s Autumn 2023 seminar series, Exploring APEC’s Role in Facilitating Regional Cooperation.

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Building Social Value in Digital Health Adoption

While the promise of digital health is universal, its implementation must address local needs and be tailored to promote adoption, recognizing that underserved populations lack adequate infrastructure and equitable access to healthcare services and digital innovations. Yet it is crucial to balance the social benefits of digital health innovations with the social costs of adoption. It is also imperative to gather evidence and insights on successes and failures when adopting such innovations in diverse local contexts.

To address these needs, the paper's coauthors advocate for a dual approach that combines a top-down, evidence-based strategy focused on designing and scaling national digital health infrastructures with the bottom-up creation of a vibrant ecosystem of local experiments generating shared experience.

“This two-pronged approach of top-down design and bottom-up experimentation, enabled through careful evaluation of effectiveness and impact, allows economies with different starting conditions to seize opportunities to ‘leapfrog’ towards more robust, resilient health systems fitting their contexts rather than imitate the development path of any given current high-income country or region,” the coauthors argue.

This theoretical framework recognizes that the social net benefit of digital innovations is heavily influenced by the initial conditions and the intended outcomes shaped by the local context. For example, in LMICs, persistent disparities in digital access and digital literacy determine the unfolding of the introduction, adoption, and integration of digital health interventions into the broader health system and compound existing inequities in access to healthcare.

Still, the co-authors emphasize that digital technologies can potentially deliver significant, even transformative benefits in LMICs that surpass the impacts seen in high-income health systems — provided that robust oversight and stewardship uphold the “First, do no harm” principle.

Integrated Digital Health Solutions

One of the coauthors’ key recommendations is to create a robust digital health infrastructure with adaptable data architectures, interoperability, and stringent privacy standards. They underscore the necessity of creating an integrated data ecosystem, as exemplified by India's Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), which facilitates personalized healthcare and evidence-based policymaking through effective data management.

Yet varying data standards across countries can pose challenges to comparability and effectiveness, in addition to ethical and legal dilemmas around sensitive health data. Singapore's Personal Data Protection Act and India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act are examples of regulatory frameworks protecting sensitive health information. These regulations are crucial for building trust among patients and healthcare providers — an essential prerequisite for successfully adopting digital health solutions.

The paper also highlights the potential of mobile health (mHealth) interventions and AI applications in revolutionizing healthcare delivery by bridging geographical barriers, expanding access to underserved populations, and shifting care from hospitals to communities. For instance, mHealth initiatives in India and Cambodia leveraging the widespread adoption of low-cost smartphones have shown promise in improving maternal and child health outcomes in low-income settings. Social media platforms further amplify the reach of public health campaigns and community-based interventions by utilizing trusted local voices.

AI is a new transformative force in digital health, enabling advancements in precision health, from diagnosing complex conditions to supporting clinical decisions. For example, in Thailand, a deep learning algorithm integrated into the national diabetic retinopathy screening program provides real-time, specialist-level diagnostics in community settings. AI solutions like this hold particular promise for addressing the challenges of low-resource health systems, including shortages of trained staff and limited equipment.

On the other hand, the coauthors caution against the risks associated with digital health technologies, including misinformation and ethical concerns. Clear data collection, storage, and sharing guidelines are critical, along with measures to safeguard sensitive health information.

Social Legitimacy and Local Partnerships

The paper emphasizes a call to action for researchers, policymakers, healthcare professionals, and civic organizations to invest in digital health infrastructure and foster interdisciplinary, local partnerships to promote need-driven, culturally sensitive, and equitable interventions. By prioritizing community engagement, the co-authors argue, digital health innovations can bridge geographical gaps, enhance healthcare accessibility, and ultimately improve health outcomes for underserved populations.

For example, the NGO Noora Health has successfully leveraged digital health across India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia to improve access to caregiver training. Successful features of their programs include mobile chat services and digital curricula integrated into comprehensive care delivery models that utilize local healthcare systems through partnerships with local governments, policymakers, and community health workers.

Ultimately, the co-authors note that the key to success lies in effectively stewarding health sectors to address priority population health needs and improve equity. “Policies should support the generation of evidence assessing digital health applications so that patients, providers, and policymakers can ask and answer the right questions in a suitable timeframe to enable a virtuous cycle of learning and improvement.” In resource-constrained LMICs, it is also essential to consider the financing levers in the public and private sectors to understand the feasibility of adopting and scaling up. In these contexts, private philanthropy can secure resources, mitigate risks, and generate evidence about best practices and scalability.

In a landscape where technology and healthcare intersect, the path forward must include prioritization of local contexts, engaging communities, and building a robust digital health infrastructure that serves the needs of all. The future of healthcare may depend on it.

On October 18, as part of its autumn 2023 seminar series on APEC in advance of the organization's meeting in San Francisco in November, Shorenstein APARC and its Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) presented the series' second event, Asia-Pacific Digital Health Innovation: Technology, Trust, and the Role of APEC. The featured panelists were Kiran Gopal Vaska, Director of the National Health Authority of India, and CK Cheruvettolil, the Senior Strategy Officer, Digital Health and Artificial Intelligence, at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Siyan Yi, the Director of the Integrated Research Program at the National University of Singapore and a former AHPP fellow, moderated the conversation.

While India is not an APEC member, Indian initiatives are examples of leveraging technology to better the health of the most vulnerable citizens in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Kiran Gopal Vaska gave an overview of the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), India's latest health initiative that focuses on the interoperability of health records, services, and health claims. He stressed that ABDM was built on previous digital infrastructure, like Aadhaar, the national digital identity system, and Digilocker, a digital storage scheme for citizens' health and other records.

The approach India has taken is for the government to build the rails—the infrastructure of the system—and create a space where the private sector can develop applications integrated with that space through application programming interfaces (APIs), avoiding the siloing that can hamper the interoperability of data.

Regarding health data, privacy is a crucial concern at the patient level. ABDM addresses this concern through the use of a consent artifact. Individuals decide whether hospitals or other medical service providers have access to their data, and this access has levels of granularity: you can share specific portions of 7 different data types, like immunizations or prescriptions. You can limit that sharing to a particular period, like one day.

Also participating on the panel was CK Cheruvettolil, who discussed strategies by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in leveraging the power of mobile phones to augment the work of Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs), the more than one million female frontline health workers in India. ASHAs can use mobile phone cameras, sensors, and streaming data to better care for low-birth-weight babies and other patients. 

He explained the critical role of taking local context into account when developing software by using the example of pregnant Indian women in their third trimesters. The custom for Indian mothers, especially in rural areas, is for the child to be born in the maternal grandparents' home. If software were to store only the mother's address, healthcare workers in the grandparents' jurisdiction would not know that a pregnant woman in the critical third trimester would soon be giving birth at a local address.

Kiran Gopal Vaska noted that India had solved the technological issues, and now the task was to push for adoption. He emphasized that the technologies underlying India's digital health stack were created as public goods for the world, and for LMICs to support each other in advancing digital health technologies, the key was interoperability, "using standards that are accessible and acceptable worldwide."