Graduate Student Conference
Crossing Boundaries, Sustaining Connections: The 25th Cornell SEAP Graduate Student Conference
Conference Dates: March 10-12, 2023
The conference packet is available here.
Scholarship is forever a site of tension between the intellectual inheritance of one’s discipline and the magnificent potentiality of original research. Between opposing pulls of past and future we notch our arrows, set our sights, and take flight into newly imagined terrains of research, political struggle, and creative expression. On the occasion of the Cornell Southeast Asian Program (SEAP) Graduate Student Conference’s 25th anniversary, we reflect on origins, destinations, and all the hurdles in between.
This year’s theme—Crossing Boundaries, Sustaining Connections—calls for us to reflect on our positions as scholars of Southeast Asia. We make our own field, but we do not make it as we please. Climate change, authoritarian revanchism, pandemics, political polarization, new modes of association—these are problems which demand the adaptation of old tools for new ends. How can we connect with and draw on the collective heritage of Southeast Asian Studies without remaining bound by limitations given and transmitted from the past? We invite reflexive, boundary-transgressing, and/or connection-making submissions that arouse productive, future-oriented (re)consideration of the historical, geographical, and institutional heritage of Southeast Asian Studies.
The 25th SEAP Graduate Student Conference will be held in a hybrid format on 10–12 March, 2023 at Cornell University’s George McT. Kahin Center for Advanced Research on Southeast Asia in Ithaca, New York and on Zoom. The University’s COVID restrictions will apply and are subject to change. We welcome abstract submissions by 20 December 2022 of original work related to Southeast Asia by current graduate students. Scholars who have completed and defended a PhD prior to March 10, 2023 are not eligible.
SEAP values a truly ecumenical range of work, and welcomes contributions from across the academy and beyond. This includes from the social sciences, humanities, creative arts, professional studies, and more. In addition to traditional papers, we are excited to receive submissions of poetry and literature, film, performance, and other art informed by scholarship and critical engagement with Southeast Asia. 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. Abstracts should be submitted via this Google Form by 20 December 2022. Please direct any questions to seapgatty@cornell.edu.