Overgrowth/Afterlife: The 26th Cornell SEAP Graduate Student Conference

The 26th Southeast Asia Program (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.

The 26th SEAP Graduate Student Conference will be held in a hybrid format on 1–3 March 2024 at Cornell University’s George McT. Kahin Center for Advanced Research on Southeast Asia in Ithaca, New York and on Zoom.

Marina Welker (Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell) will deliver the keynote address, “Cigarette Girl and Commodity Nationalism,” at 4:00pm on Friday, 1 March.