Organizer: NYSEAN
Type/Location: Virtual
Join NYSEAN for a roundtable discussion featuring Dr. Cindy Anh Nguyễn, Assistant Professor of Information Studies at UCLA; Dr. Shaoling Ma, Associate Professor of Asian Studies at Cornell University, and Dr. Rianne Subijanto, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. They will discuss how their work makes important intervention in the fields of media, communication, and information studies and reflect on how Southeast Asian studies invigorates these fields, and vice versa. Dr. Cindy Kaiying Lin, Assistant Professor of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, will moderate the discussion.
About the Speakers:
Dr. Cindy Anh Nguyễn is Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles with appointments in Information Studies, Digital Humanities Program, and Asian Languages & Culture. Her first book, Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2026) uncovers how libraries functioned as both instruments of colonial dominance and an experimental space of public critique. Her transdisciplinary research examines the historical and socio-technical production of knowledge in Southeast Asia through libraries, encyclopedia, visual media, and language through feminist, decolonial, and critical approaches. Her work has appeared in Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asia, Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, the Vietnamese American Refugee Experience Model Curriculum, and numerous edited volumes on history and digital humanities. She is the founder of Culture Futures Rest Lab which explores cultural and computational questions of interpretation and context by centering global south codesign and multivocal knowledge making. She is also a public scholar and community artist with a selection of work at cindyanguyen.com.
Dr. Shaoling Ma 马邵龄 is an interdisciplinary scholar and critical theorist of global Chinese literature, cultural history, and Asia media. Her first book, The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906 (Duke UP, 2021) asks what media studies can gain conceptually from the last few decades of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644-1912), and what this politicized and semicolonial phase of Chinese history looks like when reviewed from the new and mostly foreign communicative technologies of its time such as telegraphy, telephony, phonography, and photography. She is currently working on her second book, tentatively titled Asia in Loops, a cultural history and critical theorization of how data processing aiding East and Southeast Asian capitalist accumulation and state rationalization transformed rural environments, populations and cultural production from the late 1950s to the contemporary period. Her selected writings have been published or are forthcoming in Verge, Comparative Literature Studies,Critical Inquiry, positions: asia critique, and others. She is member of the Advisory Board for the Technicities book series, Edinburgh University Press, and serves on the main Editorial Board for Cultural Politics, Duke University Press; re:criticism, Pennsylvania State University Press; Power Currents: Asian Media in the World, University of Pittsburgh Press; and World Picture, University of Toronto Press. Ma also serves as Book Review Editor (film/media studies/drama) for the journal, MCLC: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture.
Dr. Rianne Subijanto is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. A media historian of Southeast Asia specializing in Indonesia, her research explores global communication in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonialism and capitalism, showing how technologies, infrastructures, and communicative practices are deeply entangled with power, labor, and ecology. She is the author of Communication against Capital: Red Enlightenment at the Dawn of Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2025) and a co-editor of The Indonesian Left in the Twentieth Century: Beyond the Rise and Fall of a Party(with Lin Hongxuan and Klaas Stutje; Leiden University Press, 2026). Subijanto received the 2026 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship for her current research project, “Botanical Media: Gutta Percha, Lontar, and the Environmental History of Global Communication.” She is a Senior Fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography and serves on the Executive Committee of the New York Southeast Asia Network, and as an editor for Indoprogress.com.
About the Moderator:
Dr. Cindy Kaiying Lin 林凯莹 is an ethnographer and information scientist. Her work centers on the data practices, exchanges, and expertise of climate change and their relationship to environmental governance in Indonesia and the United States. Prior to her professorship at Georgia Tech, she was assistant professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. She was also a visiting postdoctoral fellow at Cornell Tech's Digital Life Initiative as well as a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell Atkinson Centre for Sustainability and Cornell's Department of Information Science. She earned a doctoral degree from the School of Information at the University of Michigan, where she received the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award. Dr. Lin's scholarship has appeared in computing venues such as ACM CHI, DIS, and PD as well as humanistic venues such as Social Text, e-flux, University of Nebraska Press, and elsewhere. She has also co-authored two multigraphs, Technoprecarious (MIT Press/Goldsmiths Press, Nov 2020) and Digital Energetics (University of Minnesota Press, 2023).
Registration:
To attend the event virtually, please register here.