11th Annual Trans-Asia Graduate Student Conference:
Entanglements
University of Wisconsin-Madison April 4-5, 2025

The Trans-Asia Graduate Student Association is pleased to announce our 11th annual Trans-Asia Graduate Student Conference on April 4th and 5th, 2025 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This year’s theme, “Entanglements,” seeks to inspire questions of connection, intimacy, and tension in the field of Asian Studies.
2025 TAGS Conference Program
Conference Venue
Rooms: Ingraham Hall 19, 206 and 336
Address: 1155 Observatory Drive, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Find it on the Campus Map here: https://map.wisc.edu/s/a6r8ys7n
Conference Registration
No registration necessary. All welcome.
For in-person attendees: Please swipe your Wiscard or sign in with your name and email address on the paper form provided at the conference venue.
Questions about the conference should be directed to: tagsconference@rso.wisc.edu or to Adrian Beyer @ abeyer7@wisc.edu
Conference Schedule: Day 1
Friday, April 4th
Panel 1: Performance in the Philippines
8:30 AM — 10:00 AM, Ingraham 336
Passcode: TAGS
Panel 2: Gender and Embodiment
8:30 AM — 10:00 AM, Ingraham 19
Passcode: TAGS
Panel 3: Deconstructing Japanese Empire
10:15 AM — 11:45 AM, Ingraham 19
Passcode: TAGS
Keynote Lecture
12:00 PM — 1:30 PM, Ingraham 19
Dr. Durba Mitra
“Third World Feminism and the Crisis of Authoritarianism”
(Zoom link forthcoming)
Panel 4: Translingual Entanglements in Diaspora
1:45 PM — 3:15 PM, Ingraham 19
Passcode: TAGS
Panel 5: Ethnographic Methods in Asian Studies
3:30 PM — 5:00 PM, Ingraham 19
Passcode: TAGS
Panel 6: Roads, Policy & Infrastructural Flows
5:15 PM — 6:45 PM, Ingraham 336
Passcode: TAGS
Panel 7: Complicating Borders and Histories of Thailand
5:15 PM — 6:45 PM, Ingraham 19
Passcode: TAGS
Conference Schedule: Day 2
Saturday, April 5th
Panel 8: Histories of Labor and Empire
8:15 AM — 9:45 AM, Ingraham 206
Passcode: TAGS
Breakfast
8:15 AM — 9:45 AM, Ingraham 336
Panel 9: Asia in the Digital World
10:00 AM — 11:30 AM, Ingraham 19
Passcode: TAGS
Panel 10: Mediating Border Politics
10:00 AM — 11:30 AM, Ingraham 206
Passcode: TAGS
Keynote Lecture
12:00 PM — 1:30 PM, Ingraham 19
Dr. Thiti Jamkajornkeiat
“Internationalist Southeast Asias in Conjunctures”
(Zoom link forthcoming)
Panel 11: Gendered Affects in Literature & Discourse
1:45 PM — 3:15 PM, Ingraham 206
Passcode: TAGS
Panel 12: Buddhist Literature & Prose
1:45 PM — 3:15 PM, Ingraham 19
Passcode: TAGS
Panel 13: Queering Asia
3:30 PM — 5:00 PM, Ingraham 19
Passcode: TAGS
Panel 14: Contentious Sociopolitical Networks
3:30 PM — 5:00 PM, Ingraham 206
Passcode: TAGS
End of Conference Celebratory Dinner
5:15 PM — 7:00 PM, Ingraham 206
TAGS Keynote Lecture
Third World Feminism and the Crisis of Authoritarianism
April 4, 12:00 PM — 1:30 PM
Ingraham 19
Zoom link
Dr. Durba Mitra
Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Harvard University
Abstract:
This talk offers a glimpse into the vast intellectual history of Third World feminisms in the decolonizing world in the 1970s and 1980s, with a focus on connections across postcolonial South Asia. I critically engage the possibilities and limits of the feminist epistemological revolution that emerged in the dark shadow of an earlier era of utopian internationalism, globalism, and non-alignment of the 1950s and 1960s. Third World feminists created a new internationalist imaginary in response to widespread disenchantment in the decolonizing world with the nationalist project and rising neocolonial governments bolstered by economic and military interventions. Women seized the means of knowledge production, critiquing postcolonial inequality and rising authoritarianisms by imagining radically just visions of the future.
TAGS Keynote Lecture
Internationalist Southeast Asias in Conjunctures
April 5, 12:00 PM — 1:30 PM
Ingraham 19
Zoom link
Dr. Thiti Jamkajornkeiat
Assistant Professor of Pacific and Asian Studies
University of Victoria
Abstract:
The strongest methodological and historiographical legacy of Southeast Asian studies hasbeen the imperative to forge regional interconnections among various meaningful dynamics. Animating this imperative, earlier scholarship concentrated on establishing the region’s autonomy (cf. Oliver Wolters and John Smail) amidst the tempestuous Cold War funding politics. As the field navigated the transnational turn following the end of the Cold War, Southeast Asianists began to adopt a transoceanic approach to the region (cf. Anthony Reid and Tim Harper) and sought alternative frames to methodological nation-statism exemplified by the late works of Ben Anderson on global anarchism and Jim Scott on Zomia. With the rise of critical refugee studies and Filipinx American studies (cf. Yến Lê Espiritu and Martin Manalansan IV) as outgrowths of ethnic studies in the mid-2010s, the field became more receptive to the Global Asias approach that connects the region with the diasporas.
With a commitment to this legacy of fostering regional interconnections, and acknowledging recent methodological developments in the field, I have been attempting to design an analytical framework in which my research on left internationalism in global Southeast Asia can be meaningfully situated. This talk, therefore, presents my experiment-in-progress called “Internationalist Southeast Asias” (abbreviated as ISA), which intends to connect internationalist praxes arising from multiple Southeast Asian struggles against systemic forms of oppression. The ISA further politicizes the conceptual architecture of “Global Asias” by aligning its support for activist research—an inheritance of ethnic studies—with left materialist causes. In developing the ISA, I draw on political economy-oriented scholarship that illuminates the histories of capitalist development in the region—much of which comes from outside North America and falls beyond the purview of the preeminent Cornell-Yale lineages of Southeast Asian Studies. I recalibrate Gillian Hart’s “Global Conjunctural Frame” prototype to chart the conjunctural moments in 20th and 21st-century Southeast Asia and to historicize divergent forms of Southeast Asian internationalism within these moments. Hence, the ISA captures the complex entanglement between war, capital, and internationalism that manifests through the dialectics between oppression and resistance in five conjunctures: high imperialism (1900s-1920s), the interwar years (1930s), the Malaya-Bandung-Vietnam moment (1950s-1960s), the refugee-debt-financial crises (1980s-90s), and the trade war or new cold war (2010s-2020s).