Graduate Student Conference

The 27th Cornell SEAP Graduate Student Conference: Mobility

Conference Dates: March 7-9, 2025

Conference packet 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.