Graduate Student Conference
Overgrowth/Afterlife: The 26th Cornell SEAP Graduate Student Conference
Conference Dates: March 1-3, 2024
Deadline Extended, Abstracts Now Due: November 25, 2023
The 26th SEAP Graduate Student Conference looks to the afterlives of sites, organisms, and rubble. Turning neither to fatalism nor triumphalism in the Capitalocene, we look instead to Southeast Asians who have repurposed spaces, ecologies, appetites, and objects. We seek out what thrives in the cracks. How have humans and other species made use of the detritus of colonial and postcolonial endeavors? How are Southeast Asians foraging and outliving a century of mass extinction? How have traditions of art, dance, gustation, and literature metabolized the projects that seek to harness them? And what queer slangs, yesteryear yearnings, and fungal footholds find purchase in the rubble? We explore these material overgrowths in art and architecture; as well as in the digital and social spheres. We look both to martyrs and survivors. We welcome the intrusive, the unruly, the wicked.
We invite abstracts which grapple with the promise of national projects and the local and floral animi which outgrow them. We acknowledge Southeast Asians who subvert extinction in disturbed landscapes, as well as those involved in the ongoing revolts of the Third World against the first. Scholarship which wrestles with its own imperial genealogies will be seriously considered, taking the academy as a kind of rubble, a surface for overgrowth.
We will consider an omnivorous panel of submissions: from the humanities and arts, from the life sciences, as well as from social disciplines and professional studies. Works of poetry, prose, performance, visual art, music, and short film are invited to apply. For those interested in submitting non-traditional work, please note that the Kahin Center is equipped with standard audiovisual equipment for academic paper presentations. We also encourage scholars from Southeast Asia to submit; limited funding is available to support travel to Ithaca. The Cornell SEAP Graduate Student Committee will review the abstracts, select presenters, and organize panels by theme.
The 26th SEAP Graduate Student Conference will be held in a hybrid format on March 1-3, 2024 at Cornell University’s George McT. Kahin Center for Advanced Research on Southeast Asia in Ithaca, New York and on Zoom. We welcome abstract submissions by November 15, 2023 of original work related to Southeast Asia by current graduate students. However, scholars who will have defended a dissertation by 1 March 2024 are not eligible.
We are pleased to also accept work which engages with Southeast Asia but which goes beyond standard academic papers, including but not limited to: visual art, film, creative writing, and performance. We are prioritizing applicants who can present their papers in-person so please ensure you intend to travel to Ithaca when applying.
Please direct any questions to seapgatty@cornell.edu.