Dr. Poethig has lived and worked in Southeast Asia for over twenty years. She grew up in Manila as a child of Eunice and Dick Poethig, fraternal workers in the COEMAR era. She is currently Associate Professor of Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay. Her area expertise includes global gender issues, particularly feminism and militarism, religious social ethics, and religion, violence, and peacemaking. Dr. Poethig supervised education for Southeast Asian refugees in the US and Asia for 15 years. Her work focuses on progressive religious citizenship in Southeast Asia, particularly in areas of complex conflict and peacemaking. She has written on the Dhammayietra, the annual peace walk in Cambodia as transnational example of engaged Buddhism. More recently, she has focused on Filipino feminist theologians’ frameworks for “just peace” for both Communist and Muslim insurgencies in light of the US war on terrorism.
Dr. Poethig is consultant and lecturer for the Applied Conflict Transformation Studies (ACTS) MA program in Cambodia and on the Working Committee of the People’s Forum on Peace for Life, a Global South-based interfaith initiative resisting militarized globalization and creating life-enhancing alternatives. She has also served on the Board of Center for Women and Religion and has led delegations investigating the intersection of religion and politics to Cambodia/Vietnam, to China for the NGO Forum of the 4th U.N. Conference on Women, and to the Philippines.
She is a candidate for ordination in the PCUSA.