Previous Conferences
26th Cornell SEAP Graduate Student Conference
March 1-3, 2024
Chair: Joshua Chun Wah Kam
The Graduate Student Conference was held March 1-3, 2024 in a hybrid format. The theme for the 25th conference looked to the afterlives of sites, organisms, and rubble. Turning neither to fatalism nor triumphalism in the Capitalocene, we looked instead to Southeast Asians who have repurposed spaces, ecologies, appetites, and objects. We sought out what thrives in the cracks. How have humans and other species made use of the detritus of colonial and postcolonial endeavors? How are Southeast Asians foraging and outliving a century of mass extinction? How have traditions of art, dance, gustation, and literature metabolized the projects that seek to harness them? And what queer slangs, yesteryear yearnings, and fungal footholds find purchase in the rubble? We explored these material overgrowths in art and architecture; as well as in the digital and social spheres. We looked both to martyrs and survivors. We welcomed the intrusive, the unruly, the wicked.
Associate Professor of Anthropology Marina Welker delivered the keynote address, titled “Cigarette Girl and Commodity Nationalism," which explored the recent Netflix series Cigarette Girl, and the ways in which the series reproduces commodity nationalist aesthetics, fantasies, and ideologies that frame the clove cigarette (kretek) as indigenous cultural heritage.
25th Cornell SEAP Graduate Student Conference
March 10-12, 2023
Chairs: Tamar Law & Timothy Ravis
The Graduate Student Conference was held March 10-12, 2023 in a hybrid format. The theme for the 25th conference was Crossing Boundaries, Sustaining Connections. This year’s theme called for the reflection on our positions as scholars of Southeast Asia. We make our own field, but we do not make it as we please. Climate change, authoritarian revanchism, pandemics, political polarization, new modes of association—these are problems that demand the adaptation of old tools for new ends.
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Magnus Fiskesjö, delivered the keynote address, titled “Cambodia’s Stolen Heritage: A Global Drama," which explored the significance that the repatriation of stolen Cambodia art has on concept of world heritage and nationalism.
24th Cornell SEAP Graduate Student Conference
March 11-13, 2022
Chairs: Brian Sengdala & Nikita Sukmono
The Graduate Student Conference was held March 11-13, 2022 in a hybrid format, returning back to a sense of normality while catering to the opportunity to bring together participants and attendees from all over the world.
The theme for the 24th conference was (De)constructing Southeast Asia. A theme that thought about the dynamic ways we come to, work with, and move from the region as a constructed space. With these considerations, (De)Constructing Southeast Asia is an inquiry which brings these strands together, tugs at them, or perhaps pulls them apart. Senior Lecturer in Music, Christopher J. Miler, delivered the keynote address, titled “(Re)Producing Knowledge: Gamelan and Southeast Asian Music within and without Academe," asking how musical Southeast Asianists contributes to the construction of Southeast Asia and also calling for the inclusion of those from in, around, and outside academia in the study of Indonesian music.
23rd Cornell SEAP Graduate Student Conference
March 19-21, 2021
Anna Koshcheeva & Kara Guse
The Graduate Student Conference was held March 19-21, 2021 online, catering to the opportunity to bring together participants and attendees from all over the world, and powered by SEAP web-platforms.
The theme for the 23rd conference was Links and Fractures. A theme that ties in the physical limitations arising from COVID-19 that have produced severe economic and personal fractures, to the patterns that have long existed before COVID-19 in Southeast Asia, arising out of historical processes of colonization and decolonization, religion, commodity and cultural exchanges, migration, language, information technology, economic expansion, social unrest, political upheaval, and more. Assistant Professor at Cornell University, Juno Salazar Parreñas, delivered the keynote address, titled "Fracture or Linked? Southeast Asia after Area Studies Died," diving into the significance and resilience of Southeast Asian Studies as it links what may feel like fractured engagements with planetary problems.