GETSEA Simulcast Film Screening of Sotong & Against This Messy World
April 6, 2pm PT/5pm ET, via Zoom
This Spring, GETSEA hosted two short films highlighting the challenges to art and expression in Malaysia’s complex political, legal, and societal landscape.
Sotong follows four fierce local drag queens who were part of the 2022 Halloween party raided by the authorities. One of them, Juan, was arrested for ‘a man dressing up as a woman’. Two years later, they revisit on the fallout of that night as they continue to perform underground and nurture the Malaysian drag scene in all its beauty, joy, and pain.
Against This Messy World is a deeply introspective and visually captivating short documentary that delves into the heart and soul of artistic expression in Malaysia. A personal exploration, narrated by Malaysian artists, this documentary takes viewers on an evocative journey to understand the essence and purpose of being an artist in a world marked by chaos and uncertainty and piece together conversations and unfiltered moments in their lives.
Over 100 students and faculty from fifteen universities across North America came together to watch the films simultaneously, then connected via Zoom for a discussion with the cast and crew of both films.
How to Do Research in the Philippines
March 31, 2026, 3pm Hawai’i/6pm Pacific/9pm Eastern, via Zoom
The event highlighted opportunities and challenges while doing research in the Philippines by bringing together individuals with unique and extensive backgrounds on Philippine research.
Dr. Louward Zubiri (Yale University)
Yi-Yu Lai (University of Hawai’i at Manoa)
Moderated by Dr. Verne de la Peña (University of the Philippines-Diliman)
Faculty & Student Mentorship Lunch
March 12, 2026 at 11:00am to 1:00pm PT in the Vancouver Convention Center, during the Association for Asian Studies Conference.
GETSEA hosted a Faculty & Student Mentorship Lunch during the 2026 AAS Conference, bringing together graduate students and faculty from across Southeast Asian studies for small-group conversations and networking. Participants were matched with faculty mentors based on shared research interests and had the opportunity to discuss professional development, fieldwork, publishing, and career pathways in a semi-structured setting.
How to AAS: Navigating the AAS Annual Conference
March 5, 2026 at 7:30pm ET (4:30pm PT) via Zoom
Are you attending the Association for Asian Studies annual conference for the first time? Are you an undergraduate, graduate student, or early-career researcher with questions about how AAS works, how to navigate such a large event, how to craft engaging presentations, make the most of sessions as an audience member, and connect with a community of people who share your interests?
Join GETSEA for an informal discussion with our guest speakers: Dr. Kanjana Hubik Thepboriruk (NIU), Adrian Beyer (UW–Madison), Naw Moo Moo Paw (UMass Lowell), and Nida Sanglimsuwan (UCLA).
Learn about Southeast Asian Studies: An Introduction for Undergraduate Students
December 15, 2025 at 5:00pm ET via Zoom
and
February 23, 2026 at 2:00pm ET via Zoom
Learn about Southeast Asian Studies from graduate students studying SEA at universities across the United States. Area studies, resources, programs, funding, advisors, general advice & more will be discussed! It is the perfect place for young students considering a future in academia focused on the region to come speak with students further along in the process who will be happy to field any questions they have.
WITH SPECIAL GUESTS:
Caitlin O’Malley (University of Washington)
Jenny Pham (University of California, Berkeley)
June Boonyanuphong (Cornell University)
GETSEA Simulcast Film Screening of Vietnamerica
November 18, 2025 at 5:00pm ET via Zoom
Screenings of the film will be held simultaneously at numerous university campuses across North America. Following the screenings, each campus will come together via Zoom for a discussion with the executive producer Nancy Bui.
A Community Book Read with Adam Bobbette
October 16, 2025 at 3:00pm ET via Zoom
Join us for a virtual discussion with Adam Bobbette, author of The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java and winner of the 2025 Benda Prize.
From Global Discards to Local Struggles: Informal Labor, Waste Flows, and the Politics of Waste Governance in the Philippines
July 30 Wednesday at 7:30 PM ET via Zoom
Join us for a virtual panel discussion exploring the intersections of informal labor, waste flows, and the politics of waste governance. Focusing on the Philippines, the conversation will examine how gaps in governance are often filled by entrepreneurial and community-led efforts—while critiquing emerging policies that marginalize informal workers and reinforce systemic inequities.
Supported by Graduate Education and Training in Southeast Asian Studies, SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium, CCNY Sustainability in the Urban Environment Graduate Program, and The UKAI Initiative by Little Manila Queens Bayanihan Arts.
How to Conduct Research in Indonesia
April 22, 2025 at 6:00pm ET via Zoom
Are you a graduate student planning your first research trip to Indonesia? Join our event to learn about research permits, visas, and preparing for fieldwork.
Hear from experienced researchers sharing tips, insights, and lessons learned from conducting research across Indonesia. Presented by GETSEA and AIFIS.
WITH SPECIAL GUESTS:
Maho Ishiguro (Emory University)
Wendy Erb (Cornell University)
Annas Bentari (AIFIS)
Chris Hulshof (University of Wisconsin)
GETSEA Gathering at AAS
March 13, 2025 – 11am-1pm CT in the Hilton Union E, Columbus, Ohio
Please join us for the GETSEA Gathering at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Columbus, Ohio!
Connect with fellow Southeast Asia scholars, learn about new consortia and activities, and meet graduate students and faculty. A light lunch will be provided. Looking forward to seeing you there!
How to Conduct Research in Thailand, Cambodia & Laos
December 3, 2024 – 8pm-9:30pm ET via Zoom
Are you a graduate student about to embark on research in Thailand, Laos and/or Cambodia for the first time?
Join GETSEA for a roundtable and Q&A about the process of acquiring research permits, visas, and getting started in country w/ special guests Olivia Meyer (University of Hawai’i at Manoa), Holly High (Deakin University), Napakadol Kittisenee (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and moderator Pindarica Malyrojsiri (University of Hawai’i at Manoa).
This webinar is co-sponsored by the Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia Studies Group.
Preparation and Professionalism: Perspectives on Southeast Asian Studies, Graduate Students and the Job Market
November 13, 2024 – 8pm-9:30pm ET via Zoom
This event brings together three affiliates of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at UC Berkeley to offer their perspectives on how graduate students working on Southeast Asia related topics can develop a profile that best represents their potential and achievements in an increasingly competitive job market.
Thomas Kingston (PhD Student and Berkeley Fellow in South and Southeast Asian Studies with Political Economy) will discuss the value and ease of establishing an online presence via a personal website. Drawing on personal insights and experience and highlighting examples of best practice, he aims to both highlight the potential and demystify the process involved.
Professor Peter Zinoman (Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies, Co-editor in Chief of Journal of Vietnamese Studies) and Professor Lisandro Claudio (Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies and Chair of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies) will bring their differing experiences to the event, including insight gained from participation in the hiring process, publishing, conference participation and more.
How to Conduct Research in Malaysia & Singapore
November 13, 2024 – 7pm-8:30pm ET via Zoom
Are you a graduate student about to embark on research in Malaysia and/or Singapore for the first time? Join GETSEA for a roundtable and Q&A session with Dr. Meredith Weiss (Albany), Justin Weinstock (UC Berkeley) and Zheng Wang (Albany) to get a sense of what conducting research in these two countries entails.
This webinar is part of the GETSEA ‘How to Conduct Research in Southeast Asia’ Series, and is co-sponsored by the Malaysia-Singapore-Brunei Study Group.
Urban Ecologies on the Edge: A GETSEA Community Book Read by Kristian Karlo Saguin
October 16, 2024 – 7pm-8:30pm ET via Zoom
A community book read with Kristian Karlo Saguin, author of Urban Ecologies on the Edge: Making Manila’s Resource Frontier and winner of the 2024 Benda Prize.
GETSEA Simulcast Film Screening of Breaking the Cycle
October 1, 2024 – 6:00-9:00pm ET via Zoom
Screenings of the film will be held simultaneously at numerous university campuses across North America. Following the screenings, each campus will come together via Zoom for a discussion with the filmmakers, Aekaphong Saransate and Thanakrit Duangmaneeporn.
Gather with GETSEA at AAS
March 14, 2024, 10:30am-12:30pm PT, in the Cedar B Room at AAS, hosted by GETSEA
Come chat with other Southeast Asia scholars, learn about new consortia and activities, and get to know other graduate students and faculty.
Tea, coffee, and snacks will be served at this open meeting and gathering!
How to Navigate AAS (The Association for Asian Studies Conference)
March 5, 2024, hosted by GETSEA
Are you a first-time attendee of the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting? A PhD student or early career researcher with questions about how AAS works, how to navigate such a large event, and how to build community with people who share your interests?
Join GETSEA for an informal discussion with Tom Pepinsky (Cornell), Trude Jacobsen Gidaszewski (NIU), and Nida Sanglimsuwan (UCLA) about the ins-and-outs of the AAS for students and scholars of Southeast Asia.
Unwritten Rule: A GETSEA Community Book Read by Alice Beban
November 15, 2023, hosted by GETSEA
A community book read with Alice Beban, author of Unwritten Rule: State-Making through Land Reform in Cambodia and winner of the 2023 Benda Prize.
Alice Beban’s Unwritten Rule: State-Making through Land Reform in Cambodia is a first-rate study of the politics of land redistribution. Challenging the idea that land reform strengthens land tenure, Unwritten Rule shows that instead it entangles citizens in patron-client relations, creates anxiety, and actually undermines title to land. Citizens in Cambodia must contend with a state that, Beban argues, is not so much lacking in state capacity but actively making things illegible through obfuscation, secrecy, and unwritten rules. Through multiple methods, including in-depth ethnography, survey research, as well as comparative analysis within Cambodia, Unwritten Rule provides a sharp, unique, and counterintuitive perspective on land reforms in an autocratic regime. This is a superb book from which political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians can all gain deep and grounded insights.
How to Navigate AAS (The Association for Asian Studies Conference)
March 7, 2023 hosted by GETSEA
Are you a first-time attendee of the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting? A PhD student or early career researcher with questions about how AAS works, how to navigate such a large event, and how to build community with people who share your interests? Join GETSEA for an informal discussion with Tom Pepinsky (Cornell) about the ins-and-outs of the AAS for students and scholars of Southeast Asia.
Historic Cham Manuscripts of Vietnam: Creating Access to Endangered Materials
October 25, 2021 hosted by GETSEA
The collection contains 977 digitized manuscripts, totaling more than 57,800 pages of content from this important Vietnamese minority group. In celebration of this collection, Hao Phan, Southeast Asia Curator at Northern Illinois University, and Jody Butterworth, Curator for the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, will come together to discuss the origins of this collection, its research potential, and the challenges of digitizing cultural heritage materials in remote field locations.
Contested Territory: A Community Book Read by Christian Lentz
October 19, 2021, hosted by GETSEA
A community book read with Sumit Mandal, author of Contested Territory: Ðien Biên Phu and the Making of Northwest Vietnam and winner of the 2021 Benda Prize.
Lentz’s work focuses broadly on Southeast Asia’s politics, society and environment by focusing on nationalism, state formation and agrarian political economy. He has been a professor in the Department of Geography at UNC-Chapel Hill since 2011 and served as interim director of the Carolina Asia Center in Spring 2020.
In the book, Lentz explores the 1954 battle of Ðien Biên Phu, where French colonial forces were defeated by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). This marked the end of the French empire in modern Vietnam, as well as Cambodia and Laos. Lentz expands his analysis of the battle to include the encompassing Black River region and a longer time frame, from 1945 to 1960, thus contextualizing a significant moment in world history. He also offers a novel conceptualization of territory as a contested process, political technology, and contingent outcome of grounded struggles.
Becoming Arab: A Community Book Read by Sumit Mandal
April 26, 2021, hosted by GETSEA
A community book read with Sumit Mandal, author of Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World and winner of the 2020 Benda Prize.
Sumit Mandal is a historian at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. He is currently doing research on Muslim shrines as inscriptions in the landscape of transregional histories of the Malay world. He is working towards a book from this research that is tentatively titled “Saints of the Southern Indian Ocean: Sacred Geographies, Popular Faith Practices, and the Politics of Islam from Jakarta to Cape Town.”
As the AAS Southeast Asia Council (SEAC) describes it: Sumit Mandal’s Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World (2018) is a powerful and important work of history, the result of prodigious archival research. Beyond its importance in challenging conventional understandings of the category ‘Arab’ in the Malay world, it suggests new ways of thinking about the project of colonial racial categorization more broadly. Mandal importantly argues that most scholarship assumes that racial categorizations deployed in postcolonial nations stemmed from colonial practices aimed at dividing populations in order to rule them. He upends this argument by breaking down what the category, Arab, meant in historical contexts prior to, during, and after Dutch colonial rule. In particular, Mandal’s argument that colonial racial categories are not ‘totalizing’ but are subject to reinterpretation and subversion, encourages the reader to think hard about the historical processes through which such racial categories come to exist, and shift over time. Working from Malay, Dutch, French, and English language sources, this is a book whose importance will center the field of Southeast Asian studies in broader conversations about creole histories and racializing area studies.
PUBLIC READING: Public/Scholarship: A Reading of Translations in, of, and from Southeast Asia
November 18, 2020, hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison CSEAS.
Since September, approximately thirty graduate students working inside and outside the university around the world met virtually every other week in a GETSEA mini-course to read and think critically and politically about translation and movement in language in and in critical opposition to Southeast Asian Studies. In this reading, members of the workshop shared their translations across Thai, Burmese, Indonesian, Tagalog, Balinese, Vietnamese, and Hokkien.
Uprising in Thailand
October 28, 2020, hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison CSEAS.
A roundtable of experts from across the GETSEA consortium which discussed the current unrest in Thailand.
A Thousand Cuts: On Media, Policing, and Authoritarian Brutality
October 1, 2020, hosted by the Cornell Southeast Asia Program.
Part of a GETSEA Consortium series on press freedom in the Philippines, this post-screening panel focused on policing, state violence, and how the media and ideological landscapes enable populism and authoritarianism across the Philippines, U.S., and India. The discussion also served as the staging ground for transnational forms of creativity, solidarity, and resistance.
Press Freedom and the Pandemic in Duterte’s Philippines: Views from the Ground Up
September 18, 2020, hosted by the University of Michigan CSEAS.
Part of a GETSEA Consortium series on press freedom in the Philippines, this virtual roundtable discussion sought to make sense of the many overlaps from the ground up between the state of press freedom in the Philippines and the ongoing efforts of the Duterte administration to control the pandemic.