250 word abstracts and 2-page CVs should be submitted to organizers by  September 26, 2025 . Please find the individual panel statements and the organizers' contact information below.

Please note: these panels will be submitted for the in-person AAAS conference in Honolulu, Hawai’i, April 2-4, 2026.

Submission Deadline |September 26, 2023.

Archipelagic (Re)Formations of Global Southeast Asias

Submit 250 word abstracts and

2-page CV by September 26, 2025 to

GJ Sevillano (g.sevillano@northeastern.edu)

The global transit of Southeast Asias illuminates the histories, geographies, and legacies of empire—their circuits of labor, capital, and economies; their sights, smells, textures, and flavors; and their taxonomies of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class. These multiple relations are enacted and experienced across various ageographies (Chen), perhaps most crucial to our understanding of Asia and the Pacific—the archipelago. This panel, thus, responds to both the conference’s meeting place in Hawai‘i and the growing body of scholarly literature and alien forms that contend with Southeast Asia’s archipelagoes (De Leon, Espiritu Gandhi, Santos Perez). Panelists are invited to investigate not only land-based definitions of the archipelago, but also interrogate the constellation of objects, peoples, cultures, environments, and more-than-human relationships that populate archipelagic reformations (e.g., waterways, boats, cultural ephemera, military waste, tourist economies). Utilizing global Asias approaches, the goal of the panel is to probe the genres and material cultures that structure global Southeast Asias’ historical and contemporary formations.

Panelists might reflect on several questions: How can we understand the archipelago as not only land-based geography, but also as spatial, sensorial, and semiotic framework for understanding the formulation of global Southeast Asias? How might these ageographical proximities illuminate the messy, diasporic, and “glocal” conditions of island life? What scholarly, literary, cultural, artisitc and political forms are surfaced by recalibrating our perspectives with/from/to the archipelago? What forms of resistance are gained from clarifying the relationship between Southeast Asian archipelagoes and the islands of the Pacific which withstood interrelated systems of empire?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From Souvenir to Survival: Trinkets as Archives of Global Asias

Submit 250 word abstracts and

2-page CV by September 26, 2025 to

Anushmita Mohanty (mohanty2@uwm.edu) & Pratiti Ketoki (prati011@umn.edu)

The trinket, conventionally understood as a small, inexpensive, and decorative object acquired in moments of travel, is often dismissed as kitsch, souvenir, or ephemera. However, this triviality opens up questions of permanence and impermanence: the trinket is fragile and mass-produced, yet durable as a material anchor of memory. In the developing economies of Asia, the trinket is also a form of cheap, transportable, and intimate memory making. The trinket is always tethered to place, simultaneously marking where it originated and where it was taken, enacting a form of spatial and temporal mobility. It mediates relationalities between buyer and seller in transactional exchanges, between giver and receiver in acts of gifting, and between object and place in circuits of circulation and reception.

This panel re-theorizes the trinket, foregrounding its role as an object that troubles cultural erasure. We invite papers that reconsider the trinket not simply as a residue of commodified tourism, but as a minor archive: an object that condenses histories of encounter, extraction, and affect within its portable frame. The trinket therefore is a possibility of Asian American life. It acts as a possibility of movement, travel in America and around the world, one that is being constantly challenged in today’s times. It is an object of movement, of remembering and one that can easily be used as a symbol against erasure.

Possible avenues of inquiry include trinkets and tourism, where souvenirs frame contested narratives of place and authenticity; trinkets in diaspora, where objects function as carriers of cultural memory and belonging; trinkets as feminist archives, foregrounding the gendered labour and affect embedded in their circulation; trinkets and extractive economies, where global supply chains illuminate relations of labour, value, and dispossession; and trinkets and emotion; of joy and resistance coded into the object itself. We invite scholars to think about the trinket as a literary and cultural motif, as a historical object and as an anthropological participant, interrogating the registers of everyday life as sites of resistance, attachment, and survival.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Techniques of Global Asias

Submit 250 word abstracts and

2-page CV by September 25, 2026 to

Suiyi Tang (suiyitan@usc.edu)

This panel extends the queries of Global Asias scholarship to the joint concerns of technology, aesthetics, and sociality by inviting explorations of the changing categories of social difference, including political formations of the “Asian” and the “American,” that emerge when we attend to techniques which inscribe the world. Historians of technology have extensively theorized the tight link between military technology, the production of race, and the management of human and non-human life across Cold War Asia and America (He 2024; Chun et al 2024; Bui 2023; Duong 2023; Attewell and Attewell 2019), as well as the role of technological transfers in transpacific geopolitics since the beginning of the U.S.-China trade in 1784 (Bello 1992; Takaki 2012; Tchen 2001). Less attention, however, has been paid to the theoretical status of technique — concrete modes of doing inseparable from and recursively shaping the collective life of human groups (Simondon 1965; Leroi-Gourhan 1945; Stiegler 1998; Siegert 2015) — within this tessellated history of modern conquest and exchange. How would the terms of Global Asias be conjugated if we took technique, rather than the art object, the event, or the realized technological apparatus, as a point of departure? More specifically: if technique focuses attention on ways of doing that constellate forms of skilled execution, how might critical attentiveness to this type of enactment enable us to track the entangled technological, aesthetic, and political operations that together comprise Global Asias and its varied modes of expression?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to: transpacific labor histories of technical innovation; the intersection of race, cybernetics, and governmentality at midcentury; intellectual and political histories of craft, engineering, and mathematics; diasporic games and sociality; transpacific transfer and transformation of techniques and technical knowledges; and art historic studies in premodern and contemporary Asian and Asian American craft arts, music, sculpture, and architecture.