06/15/2026
We’re proud to share this podcast featuring our club member, Naw Moo Moo Paw, a PhD candidate at UMass Lowell. In this insightful conversation, she discusses her research on the human impact of conflict and disability in Myanmar, drawing from both academic scholarship and lived experience.
To hear the full interview 👇👇
Naw Moo Moo Paw was still a child in her Karen village near Bago when war became part of the landscape.
Landmines. Checkpoints. Injured neighbors. Families living with fear. Her father’s injury. The deaths and disabilities that shaped village life. “I have seen a lot of people injured or die because of the war and intense conflict,” she says. “This is very normal for me.”
That childhood has become the foundation of her academic work. Now a PhD candidate in Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Naw Moo Moo Paw studies disability caused by political violence, focusing on landmine survivors, injured resistance members, soldiers, civilians, and communities along the Myanmar border.
Her research carries a depth few outside scholars could access. As an ethnic Karen scholar, she enters these spaces through trust built across family, community, and history. She interviews survivors, lives alongside them, cooks with them, eats with them, and listens for hours as they speak about fear, stigma, survival, and the long aftermath of injury.
Her findings resist easy moral categories. Civilians may be warned that an area is dangerous, but still have to farm, travel, and feed their families. Mines captured from military bases may be reused by resistance groups. Propaganda can shift blame from one side to another. Survivors often cannot identify who laid the mine that changed their life.
Yet many do not speak first of blame. They speak of poverty, karma, duty, fear, and having no real choice.
Naw Moo Moo Paw asks us to look beyond the explosion itself, toward the injured body, the isolated survivor, the border camp, the lost livelihood, and the community that can either deepen harm or help someone recover.
Her guiding principle is simple, and difficult: civilians, resistance members, and soldiers must be treated equally as human beings.
“I’m not 100% an academic, a scholar. I must stay a human.”
Listen to Episode 553, “When the War Comes Home,” from Insight Myanmar Podcast:
https://insightmyanmar.org/complete-shows/2026/6/8/episode-553-when-the-war-comes-home
To hear the full interview, learn more about our work and impact:
https://linktr.ee/insightmyanmar
