Graduate Student Conference

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

Conference Dates: March 1-3, 2024

The 26th SEAP Graduate Student Conference looked to the afterlives of sites, organisms, and rubble. Turning neither to fatalism nor triumphalism in the Capitalocene, we looked instead to Southeast Asians who have repurposed spaces, ecologies, appetites, and objects. We sought 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 explored these material overgrowths in art and architecture; as well as in the digital and social spheres. We looked both to martyrs and survivors. We welcomed the intrusive, the unruly, the wicked.

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