Speaker: Weixian Pan, Assistant Professor of Film & Media, Queen's University

Description:
How might the history of television and the history of energy development cross paths, inform, and complicate each other? This work revisits the formative decade of China’s economic reform, the 1980s, as one such moment when the expansion of televisual technology encountered demands for the redistribution of hydroelectric energy. By examining TV documentaries, popular writings/manuals on television infrastructure, and public documents of hydroelectric dams, I advance two intertwined arguments in this talk. First, the televisual played a prominent role in animating the imaginary and material distribution of natural and technologized currents. The televisual broadcasting of river documentaries in the early 1980s, such as Stories of the Yangtze (1983) and the regional Guangdong TV series Zhujiang Qing / Love for the Pearl River (1983), reshaped China’s major rivers as complex frontiers on screen for geopolitical aspirations, cultural power, and economic resource extraction on screen. Such televisual imaginations were built upon an overlapping development of airwaves, cable, and satellite transmission infrastructure. Second, while kinetic movements of river currents generate volumes of electricity that fuel the coastal economic frontline, infrastructure projects also produce new models for engineering and managing hydraulic resources upstream. I would elaborate on this dynamic through the early development of Lubuge Dam, the first internationally funded hydroelectricity project in the reform era, and a celebrated model for China’s hydraulic engineering and management revolution. These various cultural, technological, and managerial practices for governing and redistributing water, electrical currents, and televisual imaginations, therefore, constitute a distinct form of “current governance” that relies on destructive trans-regional resource dependency while continuing to extend this political-economic logic to new resource frontiers in recent years.

Speaker's Bio:
Weixian Pan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University. She received her PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. Her research interests center on the politics of visuality, critical media infrastructure, and environmental media, specifically in the context of the People’s Republic of China. Her current book manuscript, Frontier Vision: Distributed Media in China’s Environmental Enclosure, offers a transhistorical view of the visual regimes developed from the mid-20th century to the early 21st century that recalibrate natural environments and their political promises. These medium-specific images and visuality operationalize various frontier-making projects, from socialist geological extraction, reform-era hydropower development, and techno-sovereignty in disputed oceans. Her work appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Television and New Media, Culture Machine, Asiascape: Digital Asia, and is forthcoming in Feminist Media Histories, APRIA: ArtEZ Journal, and Journal of Chinese Cinemas. She was the 2024-2025 Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellow in China Studies. She is currently working on a collaborative video project on the hydraulic and infrastructural landscapes along the Pearl River in southern China.

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Courtney Wittekind, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
Why has speculation become a dominant way of engaging with the future in moments of profound political uncertainty? This talk takes up this question through Myanmar’s proposed 20,000-acre “New Yangon City,” launched during the country’s democratic transition of 2011-2021. Drawing on ethnographic research in peri-urban Yangon, I show how farmers living in the shadow of this urban project turned to speculation when democratic and developmental promises repeatedly faltered. I argue that this vernacular speculation was less about profit than about acting on uncertainty amid compounding crises. Over time, speculative practices reshaped political participation and shifted collective demands toward individualized wagers structured by unequal access to land, capital, and time. Extending my analysis into Myanmar’s post-coup moment, I conclude by highlighting speculation as a defining feature of political life across Southeast Asia today.

About the Speaker
Courtney Wittekind is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University, where she researches uneven urban development, speculative investment, and digital technologies. She received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice, from Harvard University in 2022. From 2022 to 2024, she was a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University with the Program in Agrarian Studies and the Council on Southeast Asia Studies. Her publications include articles in leading journals such as Cultural Anthropology and Antipode, as well as her forthcoming book, City of Speculation: Unsettled Futures in UrbanMyanmar (Stanford University Press).

Speaker: Jeongsu Shin, LB Korean Studies Postdoctoral Associate, Cornell University

Description:

This talk explores how memory, ecology, and place intertwine in the Giving Forest of Jeju Island, South Korea. Once a site of violence during the April 3rd Uprising and mid-twentieth-century state massacres, and later a space of afforestation and eco-tourism development, the Giving Forest has become a living archive of layered histories and ecological regeneration. Drawing on ethnographic research with Jejuan villagers, conservationists, and environmental activists, I trace how people engage with these landscapes as spaces of mourning, care, and resistance. By attending to the social and affective lives of the Giving Forest, this talk invites us to consider how multispecies relations hold memory and articulate claims to justice. In doing so, the talk illuminates how acts of remembering simultaneously reconstruct social and material worlds

Speaker's bio:

Jeongsu Shin is the LB Korean Studies Postdoctoral Associate in the East Asia Program at Cornell University. An ethnographer of Korea, her work bridges Environmental Studies, Asian Studies, and Science and Technology Studies. Her book project, Worldly Ecologies: Landscape, History, and Decolonial Environmentalism on Jeju Island, explores how environmental movements and ecological research in Jeju, South Korea, have shaped new understandings of Jejuan identity and autonomy, tracing their roots through colonialism, the Cold War, and neoliberal development to the present.

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Taomo Zhou, Associate Professor of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
Motherhood—one of the most important and yet mundane social institutions—is central to our understanding of the latter half of the twentieth century. This talk focuses on a left-wing Indonesian activist in the Afro-Asian movements, Francisca Casparina Fanggidaej (1925–2013), a mother of seven who endured decades of forced separation from her family. Based on a close reading of Fanggidaej’s diaries, personal letters, and oral history interviews with her family and friends, I discuss the politics of maternal absence in Indonesia and China—two leading countries in the Afro-Asian movements. I explore how these two countries shaped the public and self-perceptions of non-residential mothers through their welfare provisions and reproductive policies; and how a transnational figure like Fanggidaej navigated motherhood within frameworks of revolutionary anticolonialism in Indonesia, state socialism in China, and the global rise of capitalist neoliberalism, which ultimately displaced the Third World internationalist vision once championed by both nations. I argue that the fall of Third World internationalism signaled not only a missed opportunity to reconfigure global geopolitics, but also a lost chance to redefine motherhood—not as the individualized enterprise of the birth mother alone but as a communal effort involving an assemblage of caretakers regardless of kinship or gender.

About the Speaker
Taomo Zhou is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies and Dean’s Chair in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. Her first book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019), won a Foreign Affairs “Best Books of 2020” award and an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. Taomo is currently working on her second book project tentatively entitled “Made in Shenzhen: A Global History of China’s First Special Economic Zone,” which is under advance contract with Stanford University Press. She is also researching on motherhood during the Cold War.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Liang Wu, Postdoctoral Associate at SEAP/Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at Rockefeller 374, Asian Studies Lounge. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
What and where is “Maritime Southeast Asia”? In this Gatty Lecture, maritime scholar Dr. Liang Wu presents a case study of Filipino among other Southeast Asian seafarers working in the international shipping industry across the global oceans, thus expanding the conventional definition of “Maritime Southeast Asia” – the archipelagic region of Southeast Asian countries situated between Indian and Pacific Oceans.

At this moment, hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians are circumnavigating the world as they work on ocean-going merchant vessels of contemporary shipping, delivering 90% of international trade and sustaining economies and societies around the globe. The majority of the world’s 2 million seafarers come from the Global South regions of Southeast Asian countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar, and Vietnam, alongside China and India. Due to their long contracts and cyclical employment, most of these Southeast Asian workers spend their lives on the high seas beyond national jurisdictions, under flag-of-convenience states such as Panama, Liberia, and the Marshall Islands, and within the foreign territories of port states – all beyond the definitional region of “Maritime Southeast Asia”.

Through learning about the lifeworlds and lifeways of Southeast Asian seafarers, Dr. Wu will discuss in this Gatty Lecture a range of critical topics from containerization to postcolonialism, familism, the social infrastructures of maritime ministries, and also industrial- environmental externalities. In tracing the far-reaching and uneven conditions and ramifications of such maritime metageography of sea trade, Dr. Wu’s work shifts analytical attention from regional seas, ports, and littoral societies to transoceanic labor, nodes, and networks; it advances a labor-centered and mobility-political approach to study the “maritime Southeast Asian” aspects of the global archipelago – one constituted not only by circulation and connectivity, but also by routinized absence, spatial confinement, juridical ambiguity, social invisibility, and integral accidents.

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 global pandemic and as supply chain disruptions continue to erupt, Dr. Wu’s redefinition carries urgent implications for how we conceptualize maritime regions, essential labor, and the social foundations of global logistics and human condition.

About the Speaker
Dr. Liang Wu is a SEAP Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University. He is also affiliated with the Department of Science & Technology Studies and the interdepartmental consortium Cornell Oceans. Dr. Wu started studying the international shipping and seafaring industry in 2006, and has carried out research at ports in Asia and the U.S., onboard, and online. Dr. Wu received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His interdisciplinary maritime work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Center for Engaged Scholarship, and Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies among other funding agencies. Overall, Dr. Wu is an engaged scholar who examines the intersection of maritime economy, blue humanities, social oceanography, and marine policy. He is a former Visiting Assistant Professor at Bates College enhancing ocean literacy and ocean engagement in Maine, and a Marine Policy and Science Communication Knauss Fellow at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Dr. Wu also belongs to various national and international working groups and professional associations such as Waterfront Alliance, Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative, United Nations Ocean Decade Global Stakeholder Forum, Climate Change Interest Group (CCIG) of the American Anthropological Association, and American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Gatty Lecture Series

Developing an Innovative Mobile Phone Tool for Monitoring Marine Biodiversity and Human Nutrition in Timor-Leste

Join us for a talk by Lydia O'Meara, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, Cornell University.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
Across the Indo-Pacific Coral Triangle, one of the world’s most biodiverse yet threatened regions, climate change and human pressures are reshaping both marine ecosystems and the coastal communities that rely on them for livelihoods and nutrition. Yet, integrated and timely data on ocean and human health remain scarce, especially in remote, low-resource settings. This lecture presents the early stages of a Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability study developing a low-cost mobile phone–based tool to track aquatic food consumption as an integrated monitoring indicator of marine biodiversity and food security at high frequency amidst a changing climate in Timor-Leste.
Using Interactive Voice Response technology on basic mobile phones, the project will pilot high-frequency participant-recorded dietary monitoring with women in small-scale fishing households, a nutritionally vulnerable and sentinel population for tracking community food security. By recording the diversity of aquatic foods eaten throughout the year, the study will explore how seasonal and environmental fluctuations shape access to nutrient-rich aquatic foods, whilst also providing insights into changes in marine biodiversity. This lecture will focus on the co-design, feasibility, and refinement of innovative integrated mobile phone monitoring tools suited to contexts where conventional surveys are constrained by severe weather, low literacy, and limited infrastructure. Timor-Leste serves as a case study for how inclusive, low-cost technologies can sustain nutrition and biodiversity data flows amid climate variability, informing future research and policy at the ocean–human health interface across SE Asia.

About the Speaker
Originally from Australia, Lydia O’Meara is an international nutritionist passionate about sustainable food systems for nutrition. Lydia is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, working in the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health. She is also an Emerging Leader Representative for the WHO World Health Summit in the Asia-Pacific. Her three-year Cornell fellowship focuses on developing and validating a novel mobile phone–based tool for high-frequency monitoring of diets among low-literate women in remote, resource-limited settings, with current fieldwork in Timor-Leste. With over seven years’ experience, Lydia has worked with organizations including UN Nutrition, the FAO, and WorldFish on food security and nutrition research across Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Her current work centers on aquatic foods for nutrition and the design of sustainable, equitable food systems in the context of climate change and anthropogenic pressures. Her research has been published in high-impact international journals, including the Lancet Planetary Health, Global Food Security, and PNAS. When she’s not working, Lydia enjoys exploring local foods and cultures.

Gatty Lecture Series Join us for a talk by Patrick Daly, Staff Scientist, Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
In 2004 the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated coastal regions in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India and the Maldives, causing massive loss of life and billions of dollars of damage, displacing hundreds of thousands of households, and triggering one of the largest international post-disaster reconstruction efforts in history. It is arguable that the loss of life was so high because few were prepared for a tsunami of that magnitude, as there were then no known historical or geological evidence for paleotsunami in the region. This talk brings together evidence from almost two decades of historical and geo-archaeological research that I have participated in after the 2004 event in Aceh, Indonesia to build a detailed paleo-tsunami history. I discuss how we combined archaeological landscape survey across over 40km of coastal areas surrounding the city of Banda Aceh, with stratigraphic, sedimentological, micro-fossil, and geochronological analysis of deposits uncovered within a cave on the Sumatran coast to conclusively show that the 2004 event was only the most recent in a long history of massive, destructive tsunami that have hit areas inundated by the 2004 tsunami. I end my talk by situating our results within other paleo-tsunami studies conducted around the region to propose an over 7,000 year timeline of major tsunami occurrence in the eastern Indian Ocean.

About the Speaker
Patrick Daly is a Staff Scientist for Sustainability and Resilience in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. He completed a PhD. at the University of Oxford in environmental archaeology in 2003, and held post-doctoral and research appointments at Cambridge University and the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. He founded the Risk and Society research cluster at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, where he worked as a Principle Investigator until 2024. Employing a combination of anthropological and environmental archaeological methods, his research focuses upon human responses to changing environmental conditions and long-term recovery from large-scale disasters. He has spent the past two decades conducting research on historical hazards across southern Asia and community level recovery following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. He is currently working on a monograph on post-disaster reconstruction: The Aftermath of Aid: Capacity Building, Development and Sustainability in Post-tsunami Aceh.