Maritime movement has been essential to the current moment of capitalism, marked by the optimization of supply chains. As seaports continue to scale up tremendously, however, blockages, delays, and congestion persist and even multiply, complicating popular accounts of private capital unleashing an increasingly frictionless world. This article reports from research with logistics professionals in Mersin, Turkey—host to a privatized port operated by Singaporean state-held corporation PSA since 2007. Port advocates explain the recent growth in the port’s trade volume with the trope of efficiency increase under privatization. And yet, all around Mersin, talk about congestion in cargo movement will not stop. As parties disagree over whether congestion is a humanmade problem fixable by efficiency measures, or a near-inevitable reality of maritime trade beyond anyone’s immediate control, congestion becomes the terrain of politics—an exercise in designating objects of public governance. Through congestion conversations, many reflect on how wealth from maritime trade should flow—which frictions stand in the way of more prosperity and a more equitable distribution. Anchoring ourselves in a port city, we may be able to observe where new fault lines of politics have opened up across the frictional sites of contemporary supply-chain capitalism.

Canay Özden-Schilling is an anthropologist of capitalism, technology, and infrastructure, with past and ongoing research projects on markets of electricity and global port logistics. Broadly, she is interested in the scientific and technological work cultures that create and disseminate the economic formations with which we live. Her first book, The Current Economy: Electricity Markets and Techno-Economics (Stanford University Press, 2021), is an ethnography of the electric grid in the United States in the age of competitive markets and smart grids. Her current book-length project explores maritime shipping, as seen from the port cities of Mersin (Turkey) and Singapore.

Hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and its Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) initiative.

Keynote address of the 27th SEAP Graduate Student Conference.

This talk, drawing upon years of fieldwork in Malaysia and South India has two main aims: First, in questioning the mobility and translatability of biomedical interventions given cultural conceptions of self, spirit, and wellness, I ask to what extent cultural difference really matters, as some have argued for South and Southeast Asia? Second, I query the extent to which mobility, modernity, and madness are inextricably linked, problematizing the very construction of inside and outside forces as sometimes naturalized by anthropologists, healers, and clinicians when writing on mental health, particularly when concerning spirit possession, that most “traditional” of afflictions. This binary, in turn, has effaced the complex entanglements of difference and difference-making, the heterodox and power-laden values that posit binaries by those powerful and vulnerable alike, albeit with different stakes. I argue that mobility and immobility within symbolic and semantic registers also matters, along with geographic and social mobility.

Andrew C. Willford is a professor of anthropology and Asian studies at Cornell University. His latest book, The Future of Bangalore’s Cosmopolitan Pasts: Civility and Difference in a Global City (University of Hawaii, 2018) examines the politics of language, religion, identity, and belonging in Bangalore, India. His previous research focused on forms of Tamil and Hindu displacement, revivalism, and identity politics in Malaysia.

The conference schedule is available here.

More details are also available on the conference website here.

A full packet with information about all papers being presented is available here.

How is Southeast Asia animated and made to move? Who crosses boundaries, who stays still, and what jams, messes, conscriptions, and inscriptions are we bound to?

Resisting both dreams of frictionless passage and fantasies of fixed origins, the theme of the 27th SEAP Graduate Student Conference waves in reflections on mobility and its constraints. We await explorations of that which is trans (-national, -Pacific, -imperial, -gressive) or in trans (-ition, -mission, -lation). We welcome interrogations on that which is mobile yet clandestine, unintended, or interrupted. What kinetic energies are released by diasporas in seeds, chemicals, finances, and tastes? What constitutes the motion in activist, insurgent, protest, or resistance movements, and who moves against the movers? What disturbed temporalities, what uncertain spatialities, what contingent choreographies are produced by the travel of soldiers, pollutants, scientists, viruses, and images of young hippos in Thai zoos?

Moo Deng and we invite submissions which agitate stagnant pools of nationality and syncopate staid rhythms of history. Viewing the academy itself as a site of stupor, we also welcome scholarship which unsettles the heavy dust of area studies.

The 27th SEAP Graduate Student Conference will be held on March 7-9, 2025 at Cornell University’s George McT. Kahin Center for Advanced Research on Southeast Asia in Ithaca, New York.

Please direct any questions to seapgatty@cornell.edu