"The Southeast Asian Language Council (SEALC) Projects, 2019–2024: Cornell Collaborations"
Yu Yu Khaing, Jolanda Pandin, Hannah Phan, Thess Savella, and Thúy Tranviet
Cornell University

The Southeast Asian Language Council (SEALC) is a national organization that promotes and coordinates initiatives in Southeast Asian language teaching by working closely with the National Resource Centers (NRC) for Southeast Asian Studies, the Council of Teachers of Southeast Asian Languages (COTSEAL), the Southeast Asian Summer Studies Institute (SEASSI), and area-specific organizations such as Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program (SEAP).

From 2019–2024, SEALC received a five-year grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to support six workshops focused on developing and evaluating instructional materials to strengthen Southeast Asian language instruction. These workshops addressed oral proficiency, project-based and heritage learning, reading materials development, listening assessment, and publication, and were hosted at institutions across the U.S., in Asia, and online for Southeast Asia-based instructors.

At Cornell, five of the six Southeast Asian language faculty—representing Burmese, Indonesian, Khmer, Tagalog, and Vietnamese—participated in various phases of this initiative. In this session, they will share their contributions to the SEALC projects and reflect on their experiences collaborating with colleagues across multiple institutions in both the U.S. and Asia.

Yu Yu Khaing (Burmese) will share collaborative work on Burmese Reading Proficiency Tests from the perspectives of both teachers and learners. She will also highlight how she uses proficiency-based assessment practices in her course quizzes and tests.

Jolanda Mendaun Pandin (Indonesian) participated in five SEALC projects. These collaborative efforts began with seven experienced language faculty in the U.S. and Singapore and later expanded to 14 faculty members from the U.S., Indonesia, Singapore, and Japan. In her presentation, she will focus on two projects: the Oral Proficiency Project (2019–2020), which identified Indonesian-specific language features missing from the 2012 OPI guidelines, and the Listening Assessment Design and Development Project (2024), which strengthened the Indonesian program’s curriculum by advancing listening assessment design and practices.

Hannah Phan (Khmer) will discuss two collaborative projects with Khmer language instructors in the U.S. following her participation in the SEALC projects: the Project-Based Language Learning (PBLL) (2020-2021) and the Reading Materials Development Workshops (2023). She will highlight how these workshops informed methodological approaches, material development, and assessment practices for language teaching and acquisition.

Thess Savella (Filipino/Tagalog) will discuss her collaboration with fellow Filipino language instructors from various universities in the U.S. on two SEALC projects: the Filipino Oral Proficiency Guidelines (OPG) Project 2 (2019–2020) and Listening Assessment Design and Development (2024). She will also provide context on the pre-SEALC Filipino OPG Project 1 (2011–2012), which informed the design of the OPI Project 2.

Thúy Tranviet (Vietnamese) will both open and close the session. She will begin by briefly outlining the six SEALC projects and conclude by highlighting her participation in three — OPG, Reading Materials Development, and Listening Assessment — including the materials she developed for her classrooms and the lessons learned. She presented these insights at the final symposium, Piloting the Proficiency-Based Instructional Materials and Assessment Tools: Insights and Lessons Learned, held in September 2025 at the University of Hawai’i, which marked the culmination of the SEALC projects.

Bios (in alphabetical order by last name):

Yu Yu Khaing (M.A., 2025) is a Senior Lecturer who teaches Burmese at all levels. Since joining Cornell in 2015, she has developed immersive Burmese language courses and multimedia learning materials, supported by a Cornell teaching innovation grant. She is also a certified ACTFL–ILR tester.

Jolanda Mendaun Pandin (M.A., 2000 and 2002) is a Senior Lecturer of Indonesian at Cornell. In 2017, she became the first President of the Consortium for the Teaching of Indonesian (COTI) after its transition to a non-profit, serving two terms from 2017–2023. Since 2015, she has developed conservation-focused listening materials for all levels and actively participated in the Veterinary School’s summer conservation project and One World Health course. A certified ACTFL tester since 2020, she has also collaborated on most SEALC projects since 2019.

Hannah Phan (MPS, 1998) joined Cornell in 2005 as a full-time Khmer instructor. She brings extensive training and experience in language teaching, having studied second-language pedagogy in Russia and Singapore. She has many years of classroom experience and has been a certified ACTFL tester in Khmer since 2009.

Thess Savella (M.A. 1997 and 2000) has taught all levels of Filipino at Cornell since 2002 and currently serves as President of the Consortium for the Advancement of the Philippine Languages and Cultures (CAPLAC). In 2023, she was one of two recipients of Cornell’s Sophie Washburn French Instructorship. She is also a certified ACTFL–ILR tester (since 2013) and a Seal of Biliteracy (SOBL) certification tester (since 2020). Her recent SEALC work include the Filipino Oral Proficiency Guidelines (OPG) Projects 1 and 2 and the Listening Assessment Design and Development Project.

Thúy Tranviet (Ph.D., 2015) has taught Vietnamese at Cornell since 1995. Over three decades, she has created extensive instructional materials for courses at all levels and in multiple formats. An interdisciplinary scholar, her interests span language and literary studies, international education, and international development. In addition to language courses, she has taught content-based courses on community engagement and climate change, including a field trip to Vietnam where students explored environmental issues in both global and local contexts.

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom (registration required). Join us at the LRC or on Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public.

Talk by Karen Donoghue (Journalism and Mass Communication at North Eastern Hill University)

In an era marked by migration, identity and community dynamics are constantly remade, throwing into sharp relief questions of belonging that must be addressed through a post-nationalist lens. My own scholarly focus was sharpened by a personal catalyst, directing my attention to the period of uprising in the state of Mizoram against the Indian government, called Rambuai-“troubled or disturbed land", that spanned approximately two decades, from 1966 to 1986. A body of works known as Rambuai literature serves as a cultural anchor, tying Mizo memory to this traumatic conflict.

This talk extends Rambuai literature beyond its conventional borders into the overlooked, narrow streets of Happy Valley, Shillong, in the neighbouring state of Meghalaya, where a diasporic Mizo community settled. Through their stories, I explore how identity and homeland are rebuilt in the quiet, domestic spaces of displacement. I discuss how unique perspectives emerge when narratives are analyzed through Mizo/ indigenous philosophical frameworks. Specifically, I examine how lunglen, which I loosely translate as “the inability to imagine oneself without the other,” becomes the embodied virtue underpinning the Mizo diaspora’s unique migration and rebuilding experience. I show how this community-centric approach, using oral history and photography, uncovers novel ways to look at migration experiences and the ideas of home and belonging. I will conclude by reflecting on my own positionality as a diasporic researcher and how it directly informs my current project on the Mizo diaspora in the United States.

Karen Lalrindiki Donoghue teaches in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India. She holds a PhD from the same university, which critically examines media representation of Northeast India in mainstream Indian media. Her research interests include media representation, media and culture, and oral history. She is currently a member of the executive committee of the Oral History Association of India. Her previous work includes co-leading "Stories from the Valley," an oral history project that documented the experiences of the Mizo diaspora in Shillong, culminating in a published book. She is part of the "Rambuai Archives" initiative, which seeks to record first-hand testimonies from a period of conflict in Mizoram and create a sustainable digital repository for these memories. Driven by the urgency to preserve vanishing histories, her scholarship extends to her current project on the Mizo diaspora in the United States, which investigates themes of transnational identity and community. Beyond her academic work, she is a published poet, with her work featured in the anthology "We Come From Mist: Writings from Meghalaya."

Book talk by Shani Rohit De (History, Yale University) and Ornit Shani (Asian Studies, University of Haifa)

In this paradigm-shifting history, Rohit De and Ornit Shani re-examine the making of the Indian constitution from the perspective of the country's people. In a departure from dominant approaches that foreground the framing of the text within the Constituent Assembly, they instead demonstrate how it was shaped by diverse publics across India and beyond. They reveal multiple, parallel constitution-making processes underway across the subcontinent, highlighting how individuals and groups transformed constitutionalism into a medium of struggle and a tool for transformation. The book presents a rich tapestry of these interactions, describing how many of the 500 princely states adopted constitutional documents establishing forms of representative government; discussing the contributions received by the Constituent Assembly from associations of women, Dalits, upper and lower castes, and religious groups of every faith and denomination; outlining the contributions from provincial legislatures, the judiciary and the civil service, and finally reviewing the important demands made by some tribal communities. De and Shani argue that the deep sense of ownership the public assumed over the constitution became pivotal to the formation, legitimacy, and endurance of India's democracy against arduous challenges and many odds. In highlighting the Indian case as a model for thinking through constitution-making in plural societies, this is a vital contribution to constitutional and democratic history.

Rohit De is an Associate Professor of History at Yale University and a historian of South Asia and the British common law world. He is the author of A People's Constitution: The Everyday Law in the Indian Republic (2018).

Ornit Shani is an Associate Professor in the history of India’s democracy and South Asia politics at the University of Haifa and is the Henry Hart Rice Visiting Professor at Yale University in Spring 2025. She is the author of How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise (2018)

Talk by Ateya Khorakiwala (Architecture, Columbia University)

What architectural technologies were deployed in response to colonial famine? A history of food is, at its most radical, a history of the production of poverty as a systematic condition and an institutional discourse. This paper seeks to locate famine and starvation, not as a colonial event of economic neglect, but rather as a central methodology of extracting labor knowledge from the bodies of colonial subjects. Focusing on the two famines that took place in quick succession in colonial Punjab in 1896 and 1899, this paper looks at two types of documents: the Punjab Famine Code and the Famine Commission Reports. Both documents outline how famine camps and relief works were deployed to manage populations affected by food scarcity. The famine camp and the relief work are two architectural embodiments of famine epistemology. Both typologies claimed to be humanitarian interventions towards famine relief, but were instead, this paper argues, methods of extracting knowledge from the bodies of rural laborers. Knowledge such as: how little grain did a person need to survive? What minimum quantity of grain enabled a person to still labor? How bad did starvation conditions need to be before a landowner worked alongside a peasant? In this way, the Revenue Department used architectural technologies to produce a racialized, gendered, and caste-based epistemology of famine. This paper aims to argue that architectural thought on minimum space and famine thought on minimum sustenance share an infernal history that manifests in relief works where technologies of policing the rural poor were perfected.

Ateya Khorakiwala is a historian of modernity in its colonial and postcolonial guises in South Asia and of the aesthetics and materiality of its postcolonial infrastructure and ecological and political landscapes. Her current book project, Famine Landscapes, is an infrastructural and architectural history set in India’s postcolonial countryside. The book shows how infrastructures of the developmental decades can be traced back to colonial famine policies, physiocratic theories of land management, and utilitarian theories of governance, even as these architectural interventions emerge in a contested field of Cold War techno-scientific thinking. She is also researching the labor politics and environmental histories of architectural materials like concrete, bamboo, and plastic. Khorakiwala has received grants and fellowships from the MacDowell Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the American Institute of India Studies. Her essays and articles have appeared in e-flux Architecture, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME), Grey Room, and the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE). She coedited Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (Routledge, 2022). Khorakiwala received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, her MS in Architecture Studies from MIT, and was trained as an architect at KRVIA in Mumbai, India.

In this chapter, I am examining the Pashtun nationalist claims in the context of the Afghanistan government’s historical resistance to officially recognizing the Durand Line. What has been the reaction of Afghanistan’s successive governments to the Durand Line? Can this resistance be characterized as a national reaction irrespective of the people’s ethnicity, language and religion?

Or would it be more accurate to describe it as a political project by the ethnocentric Pashtun ruling elites to unify Pashtuns and to maintain their monopoly on power?

This topic is important because the official position of the Afghan government on Durand Line has had both external and internal consequences, fostering geopolitical conflict with its eastern neighbor, Pakistan, as well as alienating its non-Pashtun citizens. If the problem persists, the current instability in Afghanistan will continue with its people paying the price.

Speaker

Sharif Hozoori has a PhD in International Relations from the Center for International Politics, Organization, and Disarmament at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.

Currently, Sharif is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Government. His research focuses on Afghanistan politics and foreign policy, comparative politics, Central Asian and Middle Eastern affairs.

Sharif has authored several journal articles and book chapters in both national and international publications. His recent book, The Political Elites and Foreign Policy at Mullah Omar’s Emirate and Karzai’s Republic (in Persian), was published in 2024 but subsequently banned by the Taliban authorities. His most recent article, “Taliban 1.0 and 2.0 in Afghanistan: Same Policies, Persistent Vision,” appeared in the Journal of Strategic Studies in June 2025.

Sharif is presently working on two additional book chapters and one journal article. The current talk is based on his under-review book chapter contribution to Oxford University Press’s Oxford Handbook of South Asian Borders.

Host

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Talk by Llerena Guiu Searle (Anthropology, University of Rochester)

In order to build a more just world order, philosopher Olúfémi Táíwo argues that we must contend with the fact that our current social order builds on relations of colonialism that did not end with colonial independence in the 1940s-1960s. Slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism have created what he calls the “Global Racial Empire” which accumulates advantages and disadvantages, harms and capabilities unevenly (2022). How might we understand “design” as a set of practices that operates within such a world system? Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with furniture and interior designers in India, this talk examines the ways in which designers navigate capitalist markets that continue to be haunted by colonialism. On the one hand, creative experts shaping elite Indian homes describe design as an anti-colonial project, poised to free India from tastes, fashions, and products from abroad. On the other, designers navigate hierarchies of values set by global markets, including demand for exotic, uniquely “Indian” products. Furniture and interior production also relies on production methods still defined through neocolonial discourses of “crafts difference” (McGowan 2009) and on caste and class dynamics that legitimize labor exploitation. By investigating how these unseen forces – histories, values, and ideologies – structure design practice in India, this paper contributes to our understanding of the politics of the creative industries and their imbrication in “Global Racial Empire.”

Llerena Guiu Searle is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Visual & Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, where she also co-edits the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture Series. She is the author of Landscapes of Accumulation: Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary India (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Her research examines capitalism and the production of the built environment in urban India.

IES Luigi Einaudi Distinguished Lecture

Amidst many proposals to incorporate AI into some aspect of the nuclear enterprise, many efforts are underway today to improve the safety of AI so that its introduction into any given part of the nuclear enterprise does not pose undue risk. Yet it does not seem possible to reduce the risks of such introduction to zero. Given that point of departure, this talk will address various criteria to that can help the cognizant individuals to make some kind of assessment for the risk associated with the incorporation of a particular AI application into some aspect of the nuclear enterprise.

About the speaker

Herbert Lin is a senior research scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His work focuses on the national security impact of emerging technologies, especially digital technologies such as cyber, artificial intelligence, and influence operations. He directs and serves as editor-in-chief of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review (setr.stanford.edu). Lin is Chief Scientist, Emeritus for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council, leading key studies on public policy and information technology from 1990 to 2014. He served on President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity in 2016, was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019, participated in the Aspen Commission on Information Disorder in 2020, and was on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board from 2016 to 2025. Previously, he was a professional staff member for the House Armed Services Committee, focusing on defense policy and arms control. Lin holds a doctorate in physics from MIT.

Avocationally, he is a longtime folk and swing dancer (and sometimes dance teacher), a very mediocre magician (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqgpaiK1xh8), and a connoisseur of dim sum.

Host

Reppy for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

In the late 1990s, as the hearings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) began, stories of past abuse, including sexual violence, within the exiled camps of the African National Congress (ANC) emerged. Despite women alluding to or directly describing violence they had suffered within the ANC, ultimately the final report of the TRC made little reference to sexual violence or violence against women within the ANC. It instead focussed on ‘political’ violence, including torture and execution, meted out to members suspected of being (or found to be) spies. While officially gender neutral, this political violence was inescapably gendered male, as only male victims were discussed, and always within the frame of ‘political violence’, even when the torture they suffered had a sexual character. Women’s experiences were not investigated as political violence. This paper reads the TRC’s and ANC’s deployments of the concept of ‘politics’ to ask how these approaches frame or erase violence against women in the context of a political movement, and how particular violence is defined as ‘political’ or ‘intimate.’

Speaker

Rachel Sandwell is assistant professor in the Department of History at Cornell University. She works on the intellectual and social history of decolonization in southern Africa, with a particular focus on women and gender politics. Her first book, National Liberation and the Political Life of Exile: Sex, Gender, and Nation in the Struggle Against Apartheid, was published with Ohio University Press, New African Histories series in late 2025.

Host

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Co-sponsor

Gender and the Security Sector Lab