Join us for a talk by Southeast Asia Program Visiting Scholar, Aung Thura Ko Ko.

This talk will take place at Rockefeller Hall 374, Asian Studies Lounge. Lunch will be served.

For questions, contact seap@cornell.edu.

Abstract: Since the February 2021 military coup in Myanmar, the country has plunged into a deep political, economic, humanitarian, and security crisis. China’s engagement with post-coup Myanmar is multifaceted. While officially adhering to a policy of non-interference, Beijing has pursued a pragmatic approach to safeguard its interests, including investments under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), border security and access to the Indian Ocean. China has been maintaining ties with both the junta and select ethnic armed groups to ensure leverage across all fronts. Myanmar’s strategic value to China is further heightened by its role as a critical supplier of raw minerals including rare-earth and tin ore, both essential to high-technology and defense manufacturing. China’s cooperation with the military regime has deepened through new mechanisms, including the establishment of a joint security company to protect Chinese investments, as well as the deployment of a ceasefire monitoring team and border operations. At the same time, the China-Myanmar border has emerged as a major hub for cyber scam centers, many operated by transnational criminal networks and protected by regime-aligned border guard forces. China’s strategic intervention in post-coup Myanmar presents a complex mix of geopolitical ambition, economic necessity, and security entanglement. This makes Myanmar a critical case for understanding how Beijing engages with fragile states to advance its regional influence in the Indo-Pacific.

About the Speaker: Aung Thura Ko Ko is a visiting scholar at the Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) for the spring semester. He was previously a research fellow at the Pacific Forum, a U.S. policy think tank based in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, and an affiliate scholar at the East-West Center from 2024 to 2026. Aung previously worked at the University of Oxford’s Global Security Programme, and his research focuses on wartime and postwar governance, China–Myanmar relations, and Indo-Pacific regional security issues. He has over 15 years of professional experience, including six years with USAID, and has worked with a range of international and local organizations across policy, governance, humanitarian & development assistance, and peacebuilding in Myanmar. Aung has been actively engaged in international advocacy efforts supporting Myanmar’s democracy movement since the 2021 military coup.

For its Spring Semester performance, the Cornell Gamelan Ensemble returns to the atrium of Klarman Hall, whose magnificent acoustics resemble those of the grand pavilions called pendhapa where gamelan is played at Java’s royal palaces. The program features ladrang Siyem, a 1929 piece inspired by the Thai royal anthem, as a way of welcoming Assistant Professor Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit, who joined the music department last fall. Wangpaiboonkit and ensemble director Christopher J. Miller will provide comments to shed light on the historical and musical idiosyncrasies of the original Siamese melody and its thoroughly Javanese adaptation.

Come learn more about our winter study abroad in Cambodia. In collaboration with the Center for Khmer Studies (CKS), Cornell's Southeast Asia (SEAP, Einaudi) Study Abroad program in Cambodia will provide an in-depth focus on the cultural heritage of Cambodia both past and present. This winter course will focus on Cambodian heritage past and present — how it's been created in the past, including the city of Angkor, and how that heritage and history is understood and engaged today.

Come and explore international research from students at the Einaudi Center for International Studies. Our undergraduate Global Scholars will present posters on their international aid projects.

Global Scholars Showcase

Global Scholars will present a showcase of their capstone projects providing public commentary and perspectives on international aid.

Undergraduate global scholars consider the multiple perspectives that shape the global landscape of international aid and the communities impacted. They have partnered with Einaudi Center practitioner in residence Paul Kaiser and faculty mentor Ed Mabaya—expert researchers and practitioners on international development—to design their projects. Applications for the next cohort will open in fall 2026.

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The Einaudi Spring Showcase is hosted by the Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Join SEAP and GETSEA for a simulcast film screening of two short films: Sotong and Against This Messy World.

We will watch the films on the Cornell campus, then join an online discussion with audiences at universities across the US for a Q&A with the filmmakers.

Sotong follows four fierce local drag queens who were part of the 2022 Halloween party raided by the authorities. One of them, Juan, was arrested for ‘a man dressing up as a woman’. Two years later, they revisit on the fallout of that night as they continue to perform underground and nurture the Malaysian drag scene in all its beauty, joy, and pain.

Against This Messy World is a deeply introspective and visually captivating short documentary that delves into the heart and soul of artistic expression in Malaysia. A personal exploration, narrated by Malaysian artists, this documentary takes viewers on an evocative journey to understand the essence and purpose of being an artist in a world marked by chaos and uncertainty and piece together conversations and unfiltered moments in their lives.

Undocumented Thai American artist and activist Bo Thai is wary of undocumented resilience narratives. The sequence of maddeningly arbitrary events that has kept him from accessing legal immigration status in the US has made him critical of the idea that undocumented people should live lives of endurance – that is, a life in which the present is perpetually deferred to a promised moment of future relief in the form of papers. In this talk, Elizabeth Rubio will discuss how ten years of collaborative work with Bo has culminated in co-authorship of a graphic novel that employs speculative fiction to explore how undocumented status and immigrant justice activism structure relationships to time. In addition to demonstrating how ethnographic and artistic co-theorization has led her and Bo to develop an understanding of undocumented activist temporality that challenges dominant depictions of undocumented movement life, Dr. Rubio will discuss the challenges and possibilities of ethnographic storytelling through visual mediums and activist-academic collaboration.

Elizabeth Rubio is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of California, Riverside. She builds on her work as a community organizer and cultural anthropologist to conduct ethnographic research that responds to emergent questions in Asian American and leftist social justice spaces. Elizabeth is currently completing her book manuscript entitled Dreams Beyond Borders: Undocumented Temporality and Asian American Immigrant Justice Activism. Based on seven years of ethnographic research with undocumented Asian American organizers in Southern California, Washington D.C., and Chicago, Dreams Beyond Borders examines the fraught politics of multiracial coalition-building in immigrant justice spaces and the complexities of enacting immigrant justice through an abolitionist lens. You can find Elizabeth’s work published in Truthout, Journal for the Anthropology of North America, Amerasia, Frontiers: A Women’s Studies Journal, the LA Review of Books, and other mediums.

International Fair showcases Cornell's global opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. Explore the fair and find out about international majors and minors, language study, study abroad, funding opportunities, global internships, Cornell Global Hubs, and more.

The International Fair is sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and Office of Global Learning (both part of Global Cornell) in partnership with the Language Resource Center.

Register on CampusGroups to receive a reminder. Registration is not required.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Bradley Davis, Professor of History from the Eastern Connecticut State 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

In 2025, leadership in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam initiated sweeping reforms to the administration of the country. Some territorial units became blended into others and long-standing categories in Vietnamese political geography, such as “city” thành phố and “province” tỉnh either transformed beyond recognition or vanished completely from the map. Despite its seeming novelty, and contrary to the judgments of policy analysts and commentators, these twentieth-century reforms were neither unprecedented nor, from a long-term historical view, entirely unexpected. In fact, we might find their clearest antecedents in reforms launched two centuries ago, when the imperial Vietnamese state sought to enhance its control over people, territory, and resources. Vietnam’s imperial past not only presaged its administrative present, it also opens a view towards possible multicultural futures.

About the Speaker

Bradley Camp Davis examines Vietnamese history with a multicultural and interdisciplinary approach. His publications include Imperial Bandits (University of Washington Press, 2017), which was long-listed for the ICAS book prize, and, as co-editor, a two-volume annotated collection of Yao texts, Sách Cổ Chữ Dao (Hanoi, 2009), and The Cultivated Forest (Washington, 2022) along with research articles in English, Vietnamese, and French. He has held visiting appointments at Université Paris-Cité, the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, and, most recently the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Currently, he is completing a book manuscript on the multi-species environmental history of imperial Vietnam as well as a book manuscript on the history of administrative reform. Since 2012, he has taught courses on Southeast Asian and world history at Eastern Connecticut State University.

Join us for a virtual discussion on colonial collections in and on the Philippines featuring presentations by guest experts:

Cheryl Beredo, Director of Collections and Chief Curator, Yale University

Surveying several collections that can support the study of U.S. colonial archives of and on the Philippines, this presentation considers the conditions of their formation and explores their continuing dynamism. This talk examines how familiar government documents, national archives, and independent research collections in the United States and the Philippines not only chronicle the activities of the colonial state, but also the enduring work of both collection- and institution-building. It concludes with observations on possibilities to continue to build archives in this area today.

Aurélie Vialette, Associate Professor, Yale University

This presentation will discuss the colonial administrative archive of San Ramon penal colony (Zamboanga, Mindanao, the Philippines, 1869). The study of this archive provides an entrance to examine the transportation and labor of the imprisoned indigenous in the Philippines under colonial rule. It will cover the experiences working with archives, both in the Philippines and in Spain, and explain how to work with both databases and documents, showing specific examples from both countries.

This event is sponsored by Cornell University Library, the Cornell Southeast Asia Program, and the Southeast Asia Digital Library (SEADL).