Ashley Thompson, the Hiram W. Woodward Chair of Southeast Asian Art at SOAS University of London, uses Buddha’s life story—his return from heaven and the socio-political order organized around the dissemination of his image afterwards—to contemplate how ideas of absence, return, and transformation shape identity and cultural restitution in Southeast Asia today.

This event was hosted by the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University, a NYSEAN Partner.

In this episode of Gatty Lecture Rewind, the host Namfon Narumol Choochan interviews Analyn Salvador-Amores (Ikin), Professor of Anthropology and former Director of the Museo Kordilyera at the University of the Philippines Baguio. Together, they discuss how the recent tourism trend has revitalized Kalinga tattoos, a tradition of the ethnolinguistic group in Buscalan village, northern Luzon, Philippines. Having conducted anthropological research on traditional tattoos for over 30 years, Professor Ikin provides nuanced insights into how tourism has changed the village’s landscape, tattoo practices, and gender dynamics among tattoo practitioners.

In this episode of Gatty Lecture Rewind, the host Namfon Narumol Choochan interviews “Mai” Anocha Suwichakornpong, independent filmmaker, producer, founder of Electric Eel Film, and Associate Professor of Film at Columbia University. They discuss how her previous and upcoming features have engaged with the politics of remembering and forgetting of state violence in Thai history.

In an article for UC Berkeley News, Lila Thulin discusses Long Le-Khac's 1,900-entry long database of Asian American literary canon. By gathering publications featuring the keyword “Asian American” or taking media from journals dedicated to Asian American studies, Le-Khac frames it as a chance for academics to audit what's considered the Asian American canon and see who might be missing or underrepresented.

Vina Orden presents her essay published in CUNY FORUM Volume 11:1, examining how narratives in popular media can perpetuate or challenge existing power structures and colonial mentalities. Orden explores this through the complex dynamics behind the pop culture success of comics like “The United States of Captain America.” Her analysis delves into the diverse creative team behind these comics, including queer, Filipino, First Nation, and South African writers. And she critically questions whether Captain America, despite such diverse creative input, must still operate within a context of “imperial power dynamics” and the realities of the U.S. nation state.

In this webinar, Deconstructing Indonesia confronts the uncomfortable truth that mainstream education, especially STEM, has been a weapon of coloniality. It has enforced a destructive divide between humans and nature, privileging extraction over reciprocity and silencing millennia of indigenous wisdom.

This talk is presented by Nathanael Pribady, MS student in Learning Analytics at Teachers College, Columbia University. This seminar was hosted by NYSEAN Partner, Deconstructing Indonesia.