Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are open to any learner, including the public.

The East Asia Program (EAP) offers several categories of fellowships and grants to support student and faculty research and study related to East Asia:

EAP Graduate Area Studies Fellowships East Asian Language Study Grants EAP Research Travel GrantsCan’t attend? Contact eap@cornell.edu.

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are open to any learner, including the public.

Please join us at the Rachel Hope Doran '19 & HEB Level T Display Cased at the College of Human Ecology, for the opening of "The Making of Barkcloth: Place, Gender, and Trans-Local Community." The exhibition is curated by Human Centered Design PhD Student Iris Luo '27 and funded in part by the Charlotte Jirousek Fellowship.

Conservation is a field at the intersection of art and science, requiring practitioners to have knowledge through both lenses. In this Barkcloth Conservation Workshop, we invite our special guest, Mimi Leveque, a trained archaeologist and lifelong conservator, who is an amazing and knowledgeable educator with extensive cross-cultural work experience. She worked for over twenty years at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. In particular, she has worked with hundreds of historic bark cloths as part of the Bark Cloth Relocation Project at PEM.

In this workshop, you will observe and experience some simple hands-on learning of two primary approaches to barkcloth treatment - humidification and mending. This workshop is open and welcome to people with any level of knowledge and experience in textile conservation, passion is the most important thing!

Mimi Leveque is a conservator of objects and textiles with a special interest in indigenous organic materials and archaeological objects. Since 2021, she has been working on the Pacific Barkcloth Project at the Peabody Essex Museum, to conserve, document, and rehouse the collection of over 900 barkcloth objects. She has been on staff as conservator at the Peabody Essex Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, as well as consulting for many museums and cultural institutions as the director ArchaeaTechnica Art Conservation Services.

Mimi received an M.A.C. in objects and textile conservation in 1978 from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and an M.A. in Western Asiatic Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology (now University College), University of London, UK. She has done archaeological field conservation in such far-flung places as Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Italy, Peru, and England.

Barkcloth is a type of non-woven textile, made directly from the inner bark of trees through a process of soaking, fermentation, and beating. Throughout history, barkcloth has been made for everyday and ceremonial uses, and could be found all along the migratory routes of Austronesian-speaking ancestors. "The Making of Barkcloth: Place, Gender, and Trans-Local Community" invites you to explore the interconnectedness among the vast waters through the lens of barkcloth, the voyagers and makers who traverse these vast waters illuminate a form of mobility that transcends geographical regional boundaries. In the exhibition, we will take a close look at barkcloth – from the front, the back, and magnified – examining the surface and the structure. Similarly, contemporary artists and designers examine and innovate upon traditional techniques. And scholars dig into the archives to examine the fissures and faults of historic records. This is a journey along the ocean, connecting art and science, past and future.
The exhibition is curated by Human Centered Design PhD Student Iris Luo '27 and funded in part by the Charlotte Jirousek Fellowship.

The Indonesian archipelago is home to a globally significant number of bird species, including endemics, but also holds the highest number of globally threatened species. The Helmeted Hornbill crisis in 2013, followed by the songbird crisis, are serious portraits of bird conservation issues in Indonesia. This talk will describe the journey of Indonesian bird conservation, which continues to fight against species extinction and map a better future for Indonesia's wildlife and people.

Speaker bio

Yokyok (Yoki) Hadiprakarsa is a seasoned wildlife conservation biologist with a tech-savvy approach and over 20 years of experience in spearheading conservation efforts throughout Indonesia and Southeast Asia. Currently serving as Director for the Forestry Program for Rekam Nusantara Foundation, Yoki is an alumnus of the University of Georgia’s Warnell School of Forestry & Natural Resources. Yoki’s expertise in wildlife conservation has been instrumental in various projects with international organizations like UNDP, SNV, MCA-I and USAID. A passionate hornbill conservationist, he has initiated numerous projects to protect these birds and combat their illegal trade, notably through CITES. Yoki holds key positions in the Indonesian Ornithologists' Union, the IUCN SSC Hornbill Specialist Group, and the IUCN SSC Indonesia Species Specialist Group. He co-founded the Rekam Nusantara Foundation, which aims to better understand Indonesia through science-based approaches.

A community book read with Kristian Karlo Saguin, author of Urban Ecologies on the Edge: Making Manila’s Resource Frontier and winner of the 2024 Benda Prize.

Register here for the Zoom link. Participants are expected to have read the book.

Urban Ecologies on the Edge offers an innovative and theoretically groundbreaking perspective on the production and maintenance of new resource frontiers on the edge of a rapidly expanding city in the Global South. Using the case study of Laguna Lake in Metro Manila, Saguin demonstrates with methodological versatility the dynamic relationship between economic development and environmental management as diverse stakeholders attempt to access and control commodity flows within chains of urban provisioning. Through meticulous storytelling, the book artfully traces the intertwined socioecologies of floods, food, fish, fisherfolk, and infrastructures. With precision and clarity, it reveals how human and nonhuman actors contend for diverse and increasingly exhausted resources, while confronting risk and precarity that manifest in conflicting visions of the future sustainability of the lake and surrounding city.

A webinar featuring Vina A. Lanzona, Francisco Jayme Paolo A. Guiang, and Lila Ramos Shahani, moderated by Christine Balance and organized by the Southeast Asia Digital Library.

Vina A. Lanzona: "Origins and Vision of the Martial Law Library: Navigating the Difficult Philippine Past"

Associate Professor in History and former director of the Center for Philippine Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa

In this talk, Vina Lanzona will share the beginnings of the idea of a digital library of Martial Law materials, as well as the vision of the project. She will outline the major challenges as well accomplishments of this collaborative project that spans across countries, oceans and continents. Central to her presentation is to show how to navigate the website, taking all of us into a unique journey into this painful and controversial period in Philippine history.

Francisco Jayme Paolo A. Guiang: “Marcosian propaganda as fascist propaganda: Myth-making and historical distortions in the 21st century”

Assistant Professor at the Department of History, University of the Philippines Diliman

In this talk, Jio Guiang argues that Marcosian propaganda is a form of fascist propaganda that utilizes networked disinformation as a means to manipulate public discourse and generate mass support. In recent years, social media platforms have become conduits for political myth-making and historical distortions that ultimately subscribe to the playbook of “fascist propaganda” in the Philippines. Thus, this presentation will show examples of social media materials so as to reveal how some forces within the Philippine political establishment have deployed this type of propaganda to systematically weaponize disinformation and gain public support—a tactic that had been proven effective for the Rodrigo Duterte and the Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. regimes.

Lila Ramos Shahani: "Grieving the ungrievable: Trauma and Memory during Martial Law"

Expert Member of two International Scientific Committees of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), where she specializes in the Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites (ICIP) and Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICICH)

If memorials can be described as the performance of memory, which stories do they privilege, and which do they eclipse or deliberately erase altogether? Memorials (monuments, historical markers, art, texts) can also be seen as the materialization of certain stories. But memorialization paradoxically preserves, even as it represses, memory itself. It is this dialectical relationship between memory and memorialization, one that is unending and open-ended, that I seek to unpack. I look at the relationship between grieving and trauma -- how the two are inseparable yet unresolvable -- in relation to narratives of torture by survivors of Martial Law in the Philippines. Following Judith Butler’s notion of “grievability,” I ask: whose lives (and stories) have been deemed to be grievable, whose have not, and how have these calibrations influenced the way Martial Law has been commemorated? Based on first-hand interviews with survivors and numerous affidavits, I examine the relative absence of memorialization of Filipino Muslims (“Moros”), particularly women, whenever the brutal record of the Marcos regime is recalled.