Speakers and Abstracts
Panel 1: Infrastructure
Moderator: Eve Devillers
Discussant: Shaoling Ma
Chrysanthemums and Chronotypes: The Techno-politics and Energo-politics of Plant Life in Central Vietnam
Jennifer Su
Abstract: In a family photo taken on the eve of Tết in the late 60s, small vases of chrysanthemums reflect the scarcity of the time before the green revolution transformed farming and floriculture in Vietnam. Today, high-tech greenhouse farming in the former French colonial hill station of Dalat has transformed it into a major supplier of ornamental flowers for both retail shops and street vendors across Vietnam. Flower production has scaled up to such a degree that, motivated by the market myth of supply and demand, the excess is often destroyed on the eve of Tết. For proponents of economic development, such overproduction is evidence of the success of industrial agriculture, ignoring planetary limits and the displaced effects, or externalities, of agri-capitalism. This paper traces the assemblages that make the large-scale cultivation of chrysanthemums in Dalat possible, narrated through the sensorial experience of viewing LED-lit greenhouses at night, a popular tourist activity there. Through chrysanthemum as case study, I argue that the affordances and transnational flows of agri-tech have as much to do with invention as they do with past and present climate imperialisms.
Metagaming on the Move: Mobile eSports in Southeast Asia and the Colonial Topographies of Singapore's Internet Infrastructure
Johann Yamin
Abstract: As an internationalized videogaming practice often obscured by spectacles of capital and competition, eSports—“electronic sports”—entangles worlds of gaming, sport, and infrastructure. Southeast Asia has served as site for prototyping the institutionalization of eSports in large-scale sporting events recognized by the International Olympics Committee, since eSports’ inclusion at the 2018 Asian Games in Indonesia and the 2019 SEA Games in the Philippines. Focusing on mobile eSports in Southeast Asia from the perspective of Singapore, an analysis of popular mobile game Mobile Legends: Bang Bang articulates the infrastructural considerations involved in the emergence of a regional mobile gaming practice, and Singapore's instrumentalization of infrastructure in its desires to become a global eSports hub. Through Patrick LeMieux and Stephanie Boluk’s elucidation of “metagaming,” Singapore’s entanglement within the material politics of internet infrastructures is explored in relation to material histories of the British Empire’s telegraph cable networks. The present-day digital infrastructures of Singapore are argued to reconfigure the colonial topographies of undersea telegraph cable routes that once connected Singapore as a colonial communications center. Drawing upon media histories and game studies, the metagames of eSports affords examinations of Singapore statecraft’s extractive use of infrastructure in interactions with its immediate region of Southeast Asia today.
Fluid, Friction, Flow: Rethinking Infrastructure and Power in the Small Spaces of British Malayan Agro-Commodity Transfers
Alfonse Chiu
Abstract: Drawing on architectural historian Swati Chattopadhyay’s conceptual formation of ‘small space’ as an analytical framework, this paper considers how the colonial extraction and transfer of natural resources across the tropical belt was facilitated through unremarkable, overlooked spaces within imperial instruments of operation and control. Durable in their functions and typologies yet fragile in their materials and legibility, the small spaces of agro-commodity flow occupy multiple modes and temporalities in diverse forms: from the transportation cases of seeds and seedling on trans-continental voyages, the test plots of novel crops from hinterlands in botanical and economic gardens, the displays of colonial exhibitions, trade fairs, and expositions, to the small subsistence farms of plantation laborers and agricultural workers, these myriad spaces coincide in their co-production of the agro-capital regime of empire. Through excavating the small spaces of capital and techno-scientific networks that undergird the advent and propagation of two cash crops, rubber and oil palm, across colonial Malaya, and examining their persistence within the state development apparatus of independent Malaysia, this paper thus argues for a reading of small spaces as crucial components of state-held infrastructural power that continue to evoke and deploy upon colonial conceptions of connectivity, mobility, and productivity.
Panel 2: Resistance
Moderator: Kyaw Hsan Hlaing
Discussant: Norhafiza Mohd Hed
Transnational Solidarities and Publishing Houses: Books, Democracy, and Resistance
Wichuta Teeratanabodee
Abstract: This paper explores transnational solidarities among pro-democracy activists in East and Southeast Asia through three publishing houses: Sam Yan Press in Bangkok, 1841 in Taipei, and New Bloom Magazine in Taipei. Founded by activists respectively from Thailand, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, these publishing houses demonstrate how local political movements intersect with transnational activism. Using social movement theory and transnational solidarity frameworks, this paper draws on interviews with founders and members, along with visual materials from field observations in Bangkok and Taipei. It argues that while these publishing houses are rooted in domestic political struggles, they also serve as cosmopolitan spaces with intellectual, political, and social functions. In addition to publishing materials on politics, society, and the arts, which facilitate the mobility of ideas and ideologies, they function as community hubs—featuring bars, meeting spaces, and hosting events such as book talks and advocacy gatherings. By examining the political roles and transnational connections of these publishing houses, this paper situates the pro-democracy movements in Thailand, Hong Kong, and Taiwan within a shared narrative of resistance to authoritarianism. It underscores how these movements transcend the artificial boundaries between “East Asia” and “Southeast Asia,” offering a more integrated perspective on regional democratic struggles.
Navigating the Signs of the Times: The Beginnings of Prophetic Visions and Landscapes of Resistance among Progressive Christian Human Rights Defenders against the Marcos Dictatorship (1974-1977)
Jess Immanuel J. Espina
Abstract: As the 20th century approached its final quarter, religious communities, particularly Christian groups, grappled with how to “navigate the signs of the times.” Critics labeled Christians as “uninvolved” in social action, a reputation glaringly evident following the atrocities of the Second World War. In Philippine historiography, scholars often view the church through the lens of friar excesses during the Spanish colonial period. While discourses surrounding Vatican II, the papal social encyclicals of the 60s, and liberation theology typically center on the Americas, this paper explores their impact on Catholic Southeast Asia. Specifically, I ask: How did reforms in the church during the 1960s and the emergence of liberation theology transform human rights discourse in the Philippines? I argue that Task Force Detainees of the Philippines (TFDP) established by the Association of Major Religious Superiors in the Philippines, was a catalyst to this change. TFDP became a conduit for political change inspired by a new social action paradigm. They delivered the first public expose of state-sponsored torture, bringing together various sectors of the opposition against the Marcos regime. TFDP’s beginnings foreground faith-based grassroots resistance, a case of building solidarity networks within the often-secular history of “political movements” in Southeast Asia.
Moving with the Past: Mobilizing Queer Aesthetics and Archives of Dissent in the 2020-2021 Thai Protests
Emi Donald
Abstract: Thailand’s 2020-2021 youth-led protests made history in several ways: in a first for Thai mass movements, university students were joined in street protests by high schoolers and those even younger; not confined to Bangkok, demonstrations took hold in cities and towns throughout the country; and the protesters’ demands constituted some of the most direct and daring challenges to the political status quo ever uttered in public in Thailand. Equally unprecedented was how protesters infused their demands for democracy with explicit commitments to gender and sexual diversity, feminist critiques of patriarchy, and a deep historical consciousness. In choosing a protest site, formulating symbolic names for their activist networks, and composing speeches and performances rich with historical references, Thai youth drew direct connections between contemporary anti-authoritarian struggles and Thai histories of dissent and injustice. In deploying historical sites and symbols as the supporting infrastructure for their demands, Thai youth moved with the past, reorientating—or perhaps “queering”—some of the most rebellious and revealing moments of modern Thai history to stand for present philosophies of bodily autonomy, feminist critique, and gender and sexual diversity. In these moves, Thai protesters in 2020-2021 not only made history but made history their own.
Panel 3: Labor
Moderator: Wen Li Thian
Discussant: Ashawari Chaudhuri
“Đi lại”: Transnational Migration and Village Mobilities
Linh Dang
Abstract: This paper describes different mobilities intertwined in the making of migrant workers’ transnational trajectories from a rural village in Nghe An, the largest labor-exporting Vietnamese province. Struggling to earn a stable income from agricultural production, villagers seek employment in more developed Asian countries, particularly Taiwan, Japan, and mainland China, through both state-sanctioned “labor export” (xuất khẩu lao động) and undocumented "đi chui" channels. The precariousness of transnational migration requires workers and their families to employ strategies to minimize risks. I focus on a form of pre-departure mobility that villagers enact to facilitate migration: the relationship-configuring mobility villagers call "đi lại" (going back and forth), which encompasses their everyday trans-spheric engagement with kinship, death, and divinity. Villagers "đi lại" by motorbike, on the road, between houses, across the spacetime of “worlds.” By showing how this capacious "đi lại," with its positive and negative potentials, anchors villagers amid the uncertainties of migration, I suggest that migration, as state-controlled mobility, follows the rough contours of intersecting local mobilities that transcend the state’s institutional boundaries. Significantly, this paper expands the scholarship on migration infrastructure in the direction of the “new mobilities” (Sheller and Urry 2006) and “viapolitics” (Walters, Heller, and Pezzani 2022) paradigms.
Migrant Absence within Transnational Labor Migration between East Java and Hong Kong
Lai Wo
Abstract: This paper explores the idea of migrant absence and the form that it takes within the context of transnational labor migration between East Java and Hong Kong. Within the homes of middle-classed Hong Kong employers, a migrant domestic worker’s presence can be intimately felt through the proximity of their labor – preparing meals, laundering clothes, and caretaking for elderly and children. These migrant laborers are simultaneously made to be unseen (Berger 1972) and rendered as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas 1966) by local Hong Kong citizens – forcing migrants to sleep in closets or cupboards in their employers’ homes and resting along sidewalks on their days off. Comparatively, despite the migrants’ extended physical absence in their sending villages, they remain ever-present within the everyday discourse, imaginary and planning among their kin who anxiously await their remittances and eventual return. Attending to questions surrounding the psychological anxieties generated from these ‘constitutive absences’ (Deacon 2012), this paper draws on 22 months of ethnography between East Java and Hong Kong to think through the implications of migrant absences within Hong Kong’s urban landscape, Indonesia’s rural migrant sending villages, and the broader economy of transnational labor migration.
Fascist Ecology: Settler Colonialism and Land Resettlement Policies in Postcolonial Southeast Asia
Perdana Roswaldy
Abstract: This research investigates the endurance of Indonesia’s land resettlement policy – a program that moves people from highly populated areas to less populated ones to cultivate cash crops – called transmigration. Originating in 1911 under Dutch colonialism, transmigration is the world’s longest-running land resettlement policy aiming for land and population distribution and food sovereignty. Despite the program’s failure to deliver its goals, the government has only continued transmigration. Using the lens of settler colonialism, I analyze how transmigration furthers the annihilation, domination, replacement, and exploitation of native land and people. Transmigration constitutes a state-building project that envisions a new postcolonial modern Indonesia and a device that consolidates imperial interests in subjugating third-world countries into a cash crop machine. The policy creates what I call “fascist ecology” – an ecosystem built on ethnonationalist spatial engineering and depoliticized subjects uprooted from their land, justifying Indonesia’s political-economic dependence on plantations. I also will historically compare transmigration to Malaysia’s Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA). I thus center the socio-spatial configuration of fascism and its mutations in Southeast Asia, a region plagued by the rise of authoritarian politics that violently protects the interest of environmentally sustainable businesses amid its struggle against climate change.
Panel 4: Identity
Moderator: Kathleen Fallon
Discussant: Viranjini Munasinghe
Displaced Becoming: Trans Chinese Niche of Vaginoplasty in Bangkok
Thelma Wang
Abstract: Renowned for its foreign-oriented, consumer-centered gender-affirming care industry, Thailand has become a medical hub for global transgender clients seeking surgeries. While the industry traditionally catered to affluent Western clients, recent years have seen a rapid growth in inter-Asian travelers, diversifying the medical markets and reshaping care geographies along lines of race, nationality, and class.
This project explores the post-pandemic influx of Chinese trans travelers to Bangkok and the formation of a Chinese niche market on the ground. Based on fieldwork in Bangkok in summer 2024, the project addressed three questions: (1) What logistical arrangement, technological mediation, and mobility pathways enable the arrival of trans Chinese in Bangkok? (2) How do they navigate medical institutions, brokerage ties, and ethnic networks while receiving care abroad? (3) What moral economies of care emerge to produce and discipline notions of authentic transness in relation to national belonging, biomedical habitus, and gender vernaculars?
In the crosscurrents of global trans flows in Bangkok, this project illuminates the territorializing effects of emerging Sino-Thai pathways and how inter-Asian capital flows sediment into new niches and enclaves of care. It also discusses contingent forms of recognition and solidarity between trans subjects and the limits of global transgender discourses.
Revisiting Chinese-Indonesians in Taiwan: Exodus, Return, and Political Memory in the Post-Suharto Era
Danny Widiatmo (Oei Chin-Hao)
Abstract: The anti-Chinese riots and violence (paihua 排華) in Indonesia following the political reform in 1998 has led to a mass exodus of many Chinese-Indonesians to Taiwan. By drawing on in-depth interviews and participatory observation, this research focuses on the Chinese-Indonesians who migrated to Taiwan after 1998 and how their return mobility to Indonesia (e.g. family visits, reunions) reflects their dual identity of being Chinese/Indonesian. Although ethnic links to Chineseness influence their migration to Taiwan, safety concerns make it a perceived “home.” This research found that annual return visits to Indonesia serve as moments that reflect their memories of paihua and anxiety of being (seen as) a minority (again). The recent 2024 presidential election and Prabowo’s (who was allegedly involved in the 1998 riot) victory have also triggered flashbacks for many. Additionally, their exclusive diasporic community-building in Taiwan, which often limits interaction with non-Chinese Indonesians, also mirrors the inter-ethnic relations in Indonesia. Meanwhile, their unfamiliarity with Chinese culture as a result of Suharto’s assimilationist policy in the past made them seen as less Chinese by the locals. Moreover, this study raises a more fundamental question of the fluid nature of Chinese-Indonesian identity that remains caught between Chineseness and Indonesianness.
Border Biopolitics and Interstitial Identities Along the Malaysia-Singapore Causeway
Emma Goh
Abstract: This paper describes the temporality of student border crossers along the Malaysia-Singapore Causeway, the busiest border crossing in Southeast Asia. Around 15,000 students, mostly Malaysians from Johor Bahru, spend close to a third of their day crossing the Causeway daily to attend local public schools in Singapore and making the same commute back home at the end of the day. Little is known about their border commutes and this paper is an effort to make legible the temporalities and spatialities of their lives in motion. While making the border commute, student commuters are thrust into both an enforced state of waiting in traffic and an accelerated pace of life across the extended geographies of the commute, such as homes and schools. Yet, the institutionalized temporality of the border commute is often mediated by expressions of agency played out in time, marked by indifference, adoption of time optimization strategies, and playing with time. Attention to the disruption and reproduction of the institutionalized temporality of the border reveals important processes that go into the construction of identity and ideas citizenship among border crossers. This paper contributes to the growing relevance of biopolitical perspectives in border studies and the intersection between mobility studies and political geography.
Panel 5: Performance
Moderator: Namfon Narumol Choochan
Discussant: Durba Ghosh
Iraya Weaving: Performing Religion and Indigeneity in the Philippines
Sunshine Blanco
Abstract: Philippine studies continues to be dominated by the colonial assumption that Indigenous Peoples are non-Christian highlanders. In this paper, I discuss how an indigenous identity that troubles these expectations negotiates both their indigeneity and citizenship in a majority Catholic country. My work with the Christianized, Tagalog-speaking, Iraya lowlanders who perform their indigeneity through basket weaving in Mindoro, Philippines reveals the role of religion in defining the idealized script of citizenship, and as hidden transcript in Indigenous designation.
Consequent to their geographic, linguistic, and religious crossings, the Irayas have become uncategorizable. My work centers their entangled embodiments through a probe of their weaving—of both baskets and identities to understand subjects that transcend existing categories. I do this through a multi-methodological approach that integrates ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and engaged co-making. Understanding the Irayas’ shifting identities, while being attentive to the unmarked role of Catholicism in shaping conceptions of indigeneity and Filipinoness in a post-colonial, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious polity will help me build a new framework for theorizing indigeneity, race, authenticity, othering, and embodiment.
Litigious women, fluid subjects: prosecuting bigamy in British Malaya, 1890s-1930s
Lijun Zhang
Abstract: This paper examines how colonial judges adjudicated legal cases of bigamy in British Malaya between the 1890s and 1930s. Often involving mobile subjects who traversed spatial and religious boundaries, bigamy cases created extensive confusion for the application of personal laws at the colonial court. Drawing on court cases and newspapers, I map out these legal troubles and suggest how individuals’ grassroots marital practices had a destabilizing effect on the colonial vision of plural legal order that drew a determining relationship between race and religion. However, such an effect had its limits. In adjudicating bigamy cases, colonial judiciaries repeatedly reinscribed racial and civilizational hierarchies by asserting the moral superiority of monogamy and connecting polygamous customs to racial and civilizational inferiority of its Asian subjects. As almost all bigamy cases involved women launching lawsuits against their husbands, I also highlight how local women used the colonial court to advance their own interests. By bringing their intimate matters to public scrutiny, litigious women deeply troubled colonial judiciaries. While women were sometimes able to gain some benefits from the colonial courts, more often they saw their interests compromised by the judiciaries who prioritized maintaining the status quo in families and upholding local patriarchal authorities.
Dragging the Peranakan: queer Singaporean theatrical subversion of Singapore’s progress narrative
Reginald Kent (Reggie)
Abstract: Peranakan culture excites and haunts Singapore. Prospering in the British Straits settlements from the 17th century, the Peranakan’s Golden Age encompassing their positions as intermediaries between empire and local ethnicities ended with the Japanese occupation. Peranakan multiculturality now lives in effigy, a conjured displayed body both convincingly present and conveniently absent, inscribed through literature like Stella Kon’s one-woman play Emily of Emerald Hill.
Peranakan culture’s inherent migration and intermarriage operate as a synecdoche of “Global Asia” (Cheryl Naruse). The Singaporean state activates Peranakan culture to perform a postcolonial economic miracle for its citizenry and tourists alike. I examine a counternarrative: Singaporean theatre company Wild Rice’s 2019 production of Emily starring Ivan Heng in drag. I read Kon’s intercultural and inter-genre text coupled with Heng’s improvised audience interactive segments in the production. Bringing interlocutors of queer of color performance to bear, I recast the state’s effigy bound Peranakan, toward an evolving figure queerly enduring. Heng’s Emily subverts the state’s homophobia, carving queer belonging into a nationally beloved text even amidst systemic queer erasure. I contend that queering Peranakan representation refigures the scripted effigy of national progress: repositioning queerness as operating at Singapore’s cultural margins towards being its core mode of becoming.