Graduate Student Conference
The 27th Cornell SEAP Graduate Student Conference: Mobility
Conference Dates: March 7-9, 2025
Abstracts Due: December 7, 2024
This CFP is also available here.
Abstracts may be submitted 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, and on Zoom. We welcome abstract submissions by December 7, 2024 of original work related to Southeast Asia by current graduate students. Scholars who have defended a dissertation by March 7, 2025 are not eligible.
We will consider a flurry of submissions: from the humanities and the arts, from the natural and 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. We are prioritizing applicants who can present their papers in-person, so please ensure you intend to travel to Ithaca when applying.
The Cornell SEAP Graduate Student Committee will review the abstracts, select presenters, and organize panels by theme. All panels will have faculty discussants. Accepted contributors should be prepared to submit full papers by February 7, 2025. Please note that while your discussant will respond to your submitted paper, you are expected to prepare a 15 minute presentation of your paper for the conference itself. Contributors submitting non-traditional work will also be required to keep their presentation within 15 minutes and to submit their materials for the discussants by February 7, 2025.
Please direct any questions to seapgatty@cornell.edu.