The Daily Bulletin Archive

The SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium (SEAC) invites applications from Buffalo State University faculty members and students (graduate and undergraduate) for the inaugural SUNY/CUNY SEAC Workshop and Field School in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in January 2024. The deadline for applications is Sunday, September 10. The SUNY/CUNY SEAC will cover all major travel and lodging expenses for accepted participants.

Funded by a $550,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation Initiative on Southeast Asia, SUNY/CUNY SEAC is a statewide consortium designed to promote research, teaching, and related efforts around Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian Americans in New York’s public universities. Vida Vanchan, Buffalo State professor of geosciences and political science, public administration, and planning, is the lead faculty member representing Buffalo State. Dr. Vanchan is a founder and principal organizer of Buffalo State’s annual Southeast Asia Week on campus, now in its 13th year.

The Luce grant will establish a Southeast Asian studies network spanning all schools in the SUNY and CUNY systems. Among the activities will be an interdisciplinary Southeast Asia–related course each year, open to all SUNY and CUNY students, on an annual theme; a workshop and field school held in Southeast Asia on that theme; a speaker series; grants for research, language training, and publications; and more. Themes for the first three years of the SEAC are as follows:

• 2023–2024: Sites and Spaces of Mobilization
• 2024–2025: Southeast Asian Identities in Popular Culture and Literature
• 2025–2026: Climate Change, Sustainability, and Geography

Participants in the three-day SEAC workshop and seven-day SEAC field school will explore creative scholarly approaches, including applied methods, to examine the work that ordinary people and marginalized communities do to carve out and sustain varied spaces of justice, peace, and solidarity, including across borders.

This year’s theme is “Sites and Spaces of Mobilization.” Papers for the workshop may address political or social mobilization in any area of Southeast Asia, from any disciplinary perspective. (Paper presentations are optional for undergraduate student attendees.)

More information, including application guidelines, is available on the SEAC website.