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Crossroads, Crossings, and Transgressions: Deconstructing Borders and Barriers in Southeast Asian/American Studies

Monday, March 13, 2023 at 12:30pm

Kahin Center

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Khatharya Um, (Associate Dean and Associate Professor, UC Berkeley), which will focus on borders and barriers in Southeast Asian studies.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu. 

Participate by Zoom here.

About the Talk

While Southeast Asia has long been a crossroad of influences and transnational movements, the rise of Asia-Pacific as an economic and political power center has brought increased attention to regional dynamics and transnational connections, processes and practices.  Transnational flows of people, goods, capital, and ideas have engendered optimism about exchange, interdependence, and understanding, while persisting conflicts over resources, territorial claims, and national belonging have animated the discourse about borders, boundaries, lines of differentiation and stratification, crossings and transgressions in the examination of both the causes and consequences of conflict. These new im/mobilities and spatialities, in turn, compel a re-thinking of prevailing approaches and epistemologies that have been delimited by disciplinary boundaries. 

This talk maps and interrogates the ways in which global, regional and local forces and dynamics inform new im/mobilities, spatialities, and belongings, and the negotiations that Southeast Asian individuals and communities have to engage at multiple levels and in multiple arenas.  It is particularly attentive to the linkages between macro forces and the micro politics of the everyday struggle to survive and resist. It critiques and problematizes the binary between area and Ethnic/American Studies, and argues for a more expansive analytical approach that focuses on continuum, intersectionality, and relationality between peoples, communities, histories, and fields of study without abandonment of historical, contextual, and experiential specificities.

About the Speaker

Professor Khatharya Um is a political scientist, Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging and Justice, and ​Associate Professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies​ at the University of California, ​Berkeley where she also received her PhD in Political Science and was the Chancellor’s Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow.  Professor Um is also a core faculty of Global Studies, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, and The Institute for European Studies at​ Berkeley.  She is a co-founder of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, and Chair of the Global Transformation Strategic Working Group of the International Alliance of Research Universities.

Professor Um’s  research and teaching interests center on Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian American studies, migration and critical refugee studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, and peace and conflict studies, with a particular focus on genocide studies.  She has published extensively and in multiple languages on Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian diaspora, including the recent books From the Land of Shadows (NYU Press), Southeast Asian Migration (Sussex Academic Press),Departures (UC Press) and Southeast Asian Migration:  People on the Move in Search of Work, Refuge and Belonging (Sussex Academic Press.  Her pathbreaking research on Southeast Asian American educational and health disparities has informed policies and programs.

In addition to her academic work, Professor Um is also actively involved in community advocacy, principally on issues of refugee integration and of educational access for linguistically and culturally diverse students.  She has  founded and served on the board of numerous refugee led and refugee-serving organizations, including as Founder and Chair of the National Cambodian American Organization, as Board Chair of the Washington DC- based Southeast Asian Resource Action Center, and as President of the National Association for the Education and Advancement of Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese Americans.  She was also a Commissioner of the National Cambodian Health Crisis Initiative, and member of the Panel of Experts of the National Education Association Quality Schools Project. 

Professor Um has received numerous awards for her community leadership and service, including congressional recognitions from Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, and the prestigious Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence and Equity.  She was the first Cambodian American woman to receive a Ph.D.

This Gatty Lecture will take place in person at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom.

Lunch will be served.

For questions, please contact seapgatty@cornell.edu

Dial-In Information

https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAudu6urDosHNSRDRgAqckWTK9eSYJ5bheo

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