Year Two Grantees and Project Abstracts, 2024-2025
Ato Aliping
Undergraduate Student, UC Berkeley
Bio: Ato Aliping is a third-year undergraduate student pursuing a degree in sociology at UC Berkeley. His main research interests are concentrated on post-colonial studies in Southeast Asia and the development of the Indigenous identity of the Igorot abroad as a part of the larger Philippine diaspora and their local community. As a Kankanaey-Bontoc Igorot-American, Ato grew up living in both Mountain Province, Philippines, and in San Diego, California where he spent most of his life as an active member of the BIBAK San Diego organization performing cultural dances while teaching and educating others in his local community about Igorot culture.
Project Abstract: This interview project invites Mark Leo, a San Diego local and an Igorot-American who works and supports his community as a Senior Local Strength Team Coordinator for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and has published works and college guest lectures on the Igorot-American socio-political and cultural history to sit down and have a conversation about his experiences growing up Igorot in San Diego and his insights on the development and social movement of the Igorot community in San Diego. My hope with this research is to further promote the underrepresented Igorot diasporic community and to add more to the conscious discourse of the Igorot community, previously misappropriated and under-represented by academia and the Philippine community by dedicating the interview to someone in the community with lived experience to tell their history and views.
Alana Hoang Ballagh
MA Student, UC Berkeley
Bio: Alana Hoang Ballagh (she/her) is a first year Masters student in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the role of more participatory decision-making in renewable energy planning and adaptation to infrastructure-related disasters. Her recent work examines energy sector planning and climate impacts in the Greater Mekong subregion and community engagement processes to support water allocation decision-making in California. Prior to ERG, she was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Vientiane, Laos, Young Professional at the East-West Center, and Southeast Asia Program Intern at the Stimson Center. She holds a BA in Environmental Studies and Political Science from Swarthmore College.
Project Abstract: I propose a multimedia project which includes imagery and audio recorded narratives and aims to archive life histories related to fish capture in central Laos. Traditional fishing and fish farming practices have supported subsistence in river-adjacent communities across countless generations and are critical within the cosmologies and livelihood practices of Lao fishing communities. This project will explore the impacts of climate change and renewable energy infrastructure on fish stocks and fishermen populations, particularly on the intergenerational cultural traditions related to fishing and fishing communities’ relationships to the Mekong River.
In exploring how rapidly changing fish capture practices are impacting cultural practices related to fishing and river use, this project will record and archive traditional fishing practices as the fishermen population declines due to emigration or moves to different industries. Interviews of two fishers involved in co-managed fisheries projects in central Laos will focus on (1) current fishing and fisheries management practices and (2) the intergenerational nature of fisheries management, including how personal knowledge of fishing practices has been passed down and changed given emerging economic trends and river-related changes.
Ribka Bhagchandani
Undergraduate Student, UC Berkeley
Bio: My name is Ribka Bhagchandani. I am a third-year undergraduate student studying Global Studies and Development Political Economy at King’s College London and UC Berkeley. My academic interests lie in the intersection of governance, economics, history, and law in influencing development structures, with a particular focus on economic recovery and democratic transitions in post-crisis societies in Eastern Asia.
Growing up in Indonesia, I developed a deep interest in understanding and contributing to the development of my country and region. Furthermore, my background as an ethnic Chinese and Indian Indonesian provides me with a unique perspective on the historical marginalization of minority communities and the complexities of a minority-driven economy. These experiences have shaped my desire to explore how political regimes influence economic recovery and development structures in transitioning states.
Through my research project, I aim to examine the impacts of Indonesia’s economic structure and its interplay with authoritarian governance before and during 1998 crisis, with a focus on the victimization of Chinese Indonesians. By documenting oral histories from those who have fled to California, I hope to contribute to a nuanced and deep understanding of the social and economic legacies of the crisis that have insofar often been ignored.
Project Abstract: This research aims to explore the experiences of Chinese Indonesians during President Soeharto’s authoritarian rule, culminating with the 1998 riots—a pivotal moment marking Indonesia’s democratic transition. Chinese Indonesians have migrated into the archipelago since the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, they have maintained a distinct cultural identity to the native population while controling a majority of the nation’s wealth, contributing to longstanding tensions rooted in economic disparities and colonial-era policies. During Soeharto’s New Order regime, assimilation policies sought to suppress Chinese cultural identity and economic hegemony. These strategies culminated during the 1998 pro-democracy riots, where frustrations over economic disparity, corruption, and collusion scapegoated the Chinese-Indonesian community.
This project will focus on the personal narrative of Mr. Lukito, a witness to the crisis who now resides in California. The study will investigate key themes, including the role of ethnicity in Mr. Lukito’s daily life under President Soeharto’s regime, his experiences during the riots, and how displacement influenced his identity as a Chinese Indonesian abroad. Questions will explore how ethnic discrimination shaped his perceptions of belonging, his perspective on the impact of anti-Chinese violence on society, and the challenges of adapting to a transnational identity.
By documenting this narrative, the research contributes to the complexities and violence of democratic transitions and a broader understanding of how marginalized communities navigate crisis and rebuild cultural identity post-migration.
Khánh-Minh Bùi
PhD Student, UC Berkeley
Bio: Khánh-Minh Bùi is a first year PhD student in History at UC Berkeley. She was a part of the Co-Design Year and Class of 2023 cohort at Fulbright University Vietnam (Hồ Chí Minh City). In her senior year, Khánh Minh completed her senior thesis, titled “Converting Mistaken Girls: The Communist Rehabilitation of Prostitution in Sài Gòn (Hồ Chí Minh City) during the First Post-War Decade (1975 - 1985)." In three chapters, the thesis studies how postwar exigencies determined the policies and the rhetoric behind the rehabilitation of sex workers in postwar Sài Gòn (Hồ Chí Minh City). For this work, Khánh-Minh received the Nguyễn Khắc Viện prize for best History senior thesis. In June 2023, she graduated from Fulbright University Vietnam with a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in History. At UC Berkeley, Khánh Minh specializes in Southeast Asia and will continue to explore the making of postwar Vietnam as the global Cold War was coming into its final decades.
Project Abstract: My SEALives project is a series of interviews with filmmaker and journalist Nguyễn Minh Chuyên. Initially a filmmaker from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam sent to the Ho Chi Minh Trail to make documentaries, Minh Chuyên became a journalist after the end of the Vietnam War (1975). He has since published over 600 articles and documentaries, focusing on individuals who suffered physical and mental injuries during wartime and exposing the neglect of veterans in the postwar era. Nguyễn Minh Chuyên is currently running a private museum dedicated to displaying his postwar works and their subjects in Thai Binh (Vietnam), where most of them came from. The interviews will take place from June to July 2025, at his personal house in Hà Nội and at his private museum in Thái Bình (Việt Nam). In addition to oral history, I will photograph Minh Chuyên, his multi-media work, and his private museum. Through the interview series, I want to learn about his life and career, and to explore his observation of the discrepancy between the state’ commemoration of wartime services and sacrifices and the prevalent struggle of veterans. Moreover, I hope to make his works more accessible to international scholars of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian studies.
Kristiana 莊礼恩 Chan
MFA Student, UC Berkeley
Bio: Kristiana 莊礼恩 Chan (she/they) is a first generation Chinese Malaysian visual artist, researcher and educator from the American South living in California. Her work examines the material memory of the landscape and the excluded histories of the Asian American diaspora. She researches the political, historical, and environmental heritage of the landscape and its material elements and organisms incorporating their properties into her processes. She is interested in the relationships between themes of migration, labor, trade, and reciprocity with the natural world, challenging ideals of extractive capitalism and grounding her objects in material tactility. Through her research she extrapolates how the histories of colonialism and the extraction of labor and resources will effect our collective futures.
Previous projects have focused on the lost stories of early Chinese diaspora settlers in California, and their connections to early industries like fishing and mining. These stories, images, and references entangle the historical and mythological, while the gathered materials attempt to transcend gaps in the written record. Kristiana is interested in themes of science and speculative fiction, and the littoral coastal zones, gleaning ancient wisdom from environments that have adapted to rapidly changing conditions.
Project Abstract: My research examines batik, a traditional form of wax-resist fabric dyeing, as a practice of cultural preservation and identity, its history as an exploited indigenous craft by Dutch colonizers, and the current status of the batik industry and its laborers in Indonesia.
My project asks: How has batik enabled artisans and traditional craft communities to retain a core sense of intergenerational cultural identity? How has the commercialization of traditional craft enabled a new wave of cultural tourism? How has batik been used as both a tool to resist colonization through the preservation of important symbols, motifs, and techniques, as well as served as a resource for colonial exploitation and vehicle for economic growth? This project seeks to understand the dynamics of protecting a practice as cultural heritage, while simultaneously promoting it as a cultural export. As a country still living with the effects of 125 years of colonial rule, how does the role of batik serve as a form of documentation, remembrance, and preservation?
I am also interested in how cultures of craft and the communal networks built around the batik industry have enabled the art forms longevity, and contributed to many communities' economic stability. I hope to learn more about the traditionally gendered roles within batik, the communities of artisans that form in those gendered spaces, and how production in creative communities creates a fabric of connections that influence the power dynamics and social structures of batik producing communities at large.
Josh Feng
PhD Student, UC Berkeley
Bio: Josh Feng is a PhD student in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on agriculture and tourism in rural Japan, merging disciplines such as economic anthropology, media studies, and the environmental humanities. His current work concerns the luxury fruit trade in Japan, particularly the cultivation, branding, and circulation of Miyazaki Mangoes. This research asks how “tropicality” is negotiated and produced in Japan through connections to other regions in Asia. Prior to his doctoral studies, he conducted ethnographic research at a Taipei night market's mango-shaved ice stall and worked as a translator for UNA Laboratories, a Kyushu-based tourism consultancy. He holds B.A. degrees in Sociology and East Asian Studies from Yale University.
Project Abstract: This SEALIVES project extends my dissertation research on the luxury fruit trade in Japan to Singapore, exploring how agricultural technologies, greenhouse practices, and tropical imaginaries move across borders. In Japan, intricate heating and cooling systems enable tropical fruit growth in cooler climates. This work examines the historical and material processes that link certain plants—and their associations with heat and "the tropics"—to specific places.
In Singapore, I will delve into these dynamics at the Singapore Botanic Gardens, specifically the Sembcorp Cool House, which uses cooling rather than heating to cultivate alpine flora. This SEALIVES project will combine a filmic exploration of greenhouse atmospheres, inspired by sensory ethnographic methods, with life histories of two Botanic Gardens staff members: a senior herbarium manager specializing in fungi and plants, and a greenhouse maintenance worker. Through their perspectives, I aim to highlight the forms of expertise and labor involved in sustaining botanical displays in these controlled environments. By juxtaposing sensory and narrative elements, this research explores how individuals’ life histories shape their interactions with these environments. How do they navigate these spaces, and what personal histories do they bring to their work?
Christian Gilberti
PhD Candidate, UC Berkeley
Bio: Christian Gilberti is a Ph.D. candidate in South and Southeast Asian Studies at Berkeley. His work centres on the British colonial period in Myanmar (Burma) from 1885 to 1948 -- particularly in regard to Burmese connections with India.
Project Abstract: Voices of Old Yangon -- For Myanmar, 1988 was an annus horribilis. Pro-democracy protests ended in a bloody crackdown and the reinstatement of years of military dictatorship. It also signaled the end of one era, and the beginning of another. In Yangon, the memory of the 1980s is slowly receding into the background, replaced with new developments and new battles to be fought. My project is an oral history of the City through the eyes of two former students who experienced one of its most tumultuous decades. One lives in Thailand, the other remains in Yangon. Their perspectives on their childhood are an inimitable look into the life of Myanmar's largest city during the Ma-Sa-La Khit or "Socialist Period".
Erika Higbee
PhD Student, UC Berkeley
Bio: Erika Higbee is a second-generation Vietnamese American and Chicanx woman from Garden Grove, California. She is a Ph.D. student in English and Mellon-Chancellor Fellow at UC Berkeley. She received her B.A. in English at UC Irvine. She is interested in documentary poetry and poetics, historiography, feminist methods of critique, archive, diaspora, poststructuralism, remix studies, and postmodernism. Her dissertation examines how contemporary 1.5- and second-generation immigrant poets repurpose fragmented archival materials, remix personal and inherited archives, and reassemble archival technologies in order to expose and critique the way imperialist, nationalist, and neocolonial projects manufacture regimes of truth to make displacement and erasure possible. A few of the poets in her dissertation project include Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Mai Der Vang, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Solmaz Sharif. Her creative work can be found in diaCRITICS, a publication of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. She teaches courses on feminism and history, anticolonial feminist poetry, and mothers and daughters in Asian American literature. She loves kumquats, orchids, and the moon.
Project Abstract: Following Đổi Mới, differences in the perception of Việt Nam’s development increased among overseas Vietnamese (Việt Kiều) and their family members who stayed to witness Việt Nam’s economic, social, and cultural changes. How do people who experience different periods of their life in Việt Nam talk about freedom and independence? How does gender affect trajectories of migration? How can we create room for the truth of multiple narratives, and how is this important for understanding liberation movements? I choose to document the life histories of two Vietnamese women: my mother, Nguyễn Thu Hương, and her sister, Nguyễn Thu Vân. Vân, born in 1952, lives in Hồ Chí Minh City/Sài Gòn and was part of the resettlement of over a million Vietnamese refugees from Northern Việt Nam (Miền Bắc) to Southern Việt Nam (Miền Nam) in 1954. Hương, born in Sài Gòn in 1954, left in 1990 and now lives in Garden Grove, California. Their continued long-distance correspondence is a site of re-creation for the afterlives of difficult historical memories. I hope to document the vast experiences both sisters have had in reimagining the shape of their lives—lives touched by liminality, violence, and impasse, but also survival, knowledge, and love.
Thomas Kingston
PhD Student, UC Berkeley
Bio: Originally from the liminal space between North Yorkshire and Teesside in Northeast England. I have somehow managed to transform an annoying childhood habit of always asking ‘but why?’ into something resembling the foundations of a career. Though no longer an annoying child my intellectual curiosity remains and has brought me to the Bay Area of California, where I am a PhD student and Berkeley Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Primarily a historian, my research looks at how economic, political, legal, environmental and spatial dynamics shaped and disrupted the formation, consolidation and disintegration of colonial empires in Southeast Asia, with a current focus on the British Empire in Burma and, what is now, Malaysia. I approach this by drawing upon a broad academic background including insight gleaned through undergraduate studies in law and two graduate degrees that brought together history, philosophy, politics, law and economics in Asian contexts. This is complemented by ‘real world’ experience that has seen me work with the International Labour Organisation, the BBC, UNHRC as well as leading national and grassroots disability and minority rights organisations in the UK and Cambodia. Ever ambitious, I am currently trying to unlock the secret of writing shorter sentences.
Inditian Latifa
PhD Candidate, UC Santa Cruz
Bio: Inditian Latifa grew up in reclaimed swampland in the Greater Jakarta Area. She learned to share her home and negotiate boundaries with monitor lizards, snakes, and other displaced swamp animals that entered in search of food and shelter. This experience informs her research interests in how human and nonhuman communities live collectively within dynamic land-water environments, such as wetlands, deltas, and coasts, reshaped by the continuing influence of colonial and postcolonial infrastructures tied to empire and capital. She is currently a doctoral candidate and Wenner Gren Foundation Wadsworth Fellow in the Cultural Anthropology program at UC Santa Cruz. Her dissertation is a critical description of how successive state and commercially sponsored water management projects in Aceh’s Peusangan riverscape generate emergent and uncertain ecological and economic conditions, creating unevenly distributed consequences that different groups and corporations must navigate and operate within. She holds a joint MA in History from Universität Leipzig and Universität Wien, and a BA in English from Universitas Indonesia. She is also an amateur birder who enjoys cooking and connecting with others through food.
Project Abstract: Inditian's project combines life history research and ethnographic participant observation. Set within Aceh’s Peusangan riverscape, it focuses on two Acehnese female reed gatherers who lived through the thirty-year civil war between Acehnese guerrillas and the Indonesian armed forces (1975–2005), during which the marshland where they gathered reeds also became a battlefield. Cek Satar began gathering reeds in the 1980s, initially accompanying her mother to the marsh, while Cek Ma learned the practice from Cek Satar in the 1990s. Both women continue to gather reeds, although the marsh has increasingly been converted for other uses. Guided by scholarship on the relations between memory and landscape, this project follows Cek Satar and Cek Ma as they share their stories while toiling in the marsh. By wading, squelching, crouching, and balancing alongside the women as they locate and harvest binyeut, binout, ngom, and other types of reeds, shaping the marsh in the process, one may find that the terrain itself participates in the women’s stories of reed gathering during the war. This project highlights how these women offer a politics of habitability that is both material and mundane, with the marsh and its elements acting as agents.
Christopher LeBoa
PhD Candidate, UC Berkeley
Bio: Christopher LeBoa is a PhD candidate in the department of Environmental Health Sciences at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on environmental exposures to infectious diseases in Bangladesh, where he has lived for more than a year while working with the international center of diarrheal disease research, Bangladesh. He has worked with individuals in the Rohingya refugee camps in southern Bangladesh since 2018, evaluating the environmental and human impacts of a clean cooking program in the camps. He has worked as an audio editor with the Stanford Storytelling Project and is on air with UC Berkeley's radio station KALX. He is interested in understanding the complex power dynamics that perpetuate humanitarian disasters and building humanizing narratives to center and offer power to those exposed to harmful conditions locally and globally.
Project Abstract: The Rohingya, an ethnic minority from Northern Myanmar, have been subject to decades of racism and displacement. This conflict came to a head in 2017 when the Myanmar Army perpetuated a genocidal campaign against the Rohingya population, burning entire villages and forcing nearly a million people to flee. Over the last 7 years, this population has been forced to live in a barb wire-rimmed camp in the Southern Corner of Bangladesh called Kutupalong. In the camps it is illegal to work, and foreign aid has slowly dried up over the last years, forcing many to make the difficult choice of working illegally or making the perilous journey to Malaysia or Indonesia to find work. In the Rohingya diaspora, the question of how one remains connected to their identity as a Rohingya is an actively negotiated one. I will be interviewing my friend and activist in the Rohingya camps, Ro and his brother, who works in a milk packaging plant in India, sending remittances back to their family about questions of identity, world view, and hopes for the future of the Rohingya people in an especially perilous time.
Yustina Octifanny
PhD Research Scholar, National University of Singapore
Bio: Yustina Octifanny, or Fanny (she/her), is a PhD Research Scholar in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. Her doctoral research is part of the Carbon Governance in Southeast Asia program at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. As an aspiring political ecologist, she is interested in investigating ongoing socio-environmental changes in carbon-rich landscapes, particularly in peatlands and related ecosystems, where voluntary carbon market (VCM) initiatives have surged. Her research focuses on Southeast Asia, where new regulations and the commercialization of carbon-rich landscapes have been rapidly implemented and have a profound gendered impact on the local communities.
Fanny is an associate at Dala Institute in Indonesia, where she worked on research, technical assistance, evaluation, and learning for the intersection of nature-society studies and consultation services. Fanny holds a Master of Urban and Regional Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles, USA, and a Bachelor of Science from Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia.
Project Abstract: Since 2014, the number of violent incidents against Indonesian environmental defenders opposing resource enclosure and extraction activities has been surging. However, it is not only commodity-based resource extraction and land grabbing that result in violence against these defenders; carbon conservation projects (e.g., REDD+ and the Zero-Burning Policy) and development projects (e.g., Food Estate) also contribute to these incidents. Such projects cause profound socio-ecological changes, including spoiling local paddy seeds and displacing women from traditional rice farming. These development and carbon emission reduction initiatives have particularly affected women. However, limited evidence exists on how affected women have responded to and mobilized against the recent surge in gendered carbon projects.
This study aims to explore how Indigenous women in Central Kalimantan defend their lives, livelihoods, and socio-ecological knowledge by organizing collectively, strategizing against environmental exploitation, and preparing to resist future threats from the food estate and carbon credit projects. Additionally, this research seeks to understand women’s experiences of external pressure and violence and to identify potential community measures to protect environmental defenders. Using a multimodal approach that combines video interviews and written reports, this study will focus on Indigenous women's agency, to identify ways to protect and empower their worldview.
Phan Thị Kim Tâm
PhD Student, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University Hanoi
Bio: Phan Thị Kim Tâm is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University Hanoi (USSH). She received her MA and BA both in Anthropology at USSH and has a great passion for this major. Tam’s main research interests are ethnic minority communities, local knowledge and the management of rice landraces, the State-population-market nexus, adaptation strategies to climate-related hazards, and currently the “commons” issue/common-pool resources management in Vietnam. Since her undergraduate program, she has been working as a research associate and junior research fellow in multiple research projects of the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD), conducted various long ethnographical fieldwork in Vietnam’s northern mountainous area and mainly studied Thai, Red Yao, and Tay communities.
Project Abstract: My project seeks to understand the various forms of collective rules governing common-pool resources in Vietnam’s northern mountainous areas from the perspective and life stories of the local elites, exploring how they respond to and practice in the complex context following Vietnam’s Đổi Mới period (market reform). The self-governance of common-pool resources by ethnic minority groups has existed for centuries in the upland areas of Vietnam, where the state's power could not reach due to the friction of mountain terrain. Nowadays, in a post-socialist system where a liberal market economy coexists with and is ruled by a strong single-party state, these community-based management models still embody their values, especially where state management and privatization have failed to protect natural resources from over-exploitation. In particular, local elites such as shamans, village heads, patriarchs, and elders have played an important and irreplaceable role in managing and monitoring these institutions. By documenting how common-pool resources (e.g. water for usage, irrigation, forest, grazing area, geographical indication) have been managed by local communities (e.g. Thai, Red Yao, Hmong) in remote mountainous regions of Lao Cai Province through a multimedia oral history approach, this project can bring in-depth qualitative data to contribute to a better understanding of the complex local institutions that govern common pool resources in Vietnam.
Chairat Polmuk
Assistant Professor, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand
Bio: Chairat Polmuk is an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies in the Department of Thai, Faculty of Arts, at Chulalongkorn University, where he teaches Southeast Asian languages and literature, cultural theory, and media studies. He currently serves as the Director of Chulalongkorn University’s Southeast Asian Studies Program. Chairat earned his Ph.D. in Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture from Cornell University. His research focuses on the affective and intermedial aspects of post-Cold War literature and visual culture, particularly in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. He is also a member of the editorial collective of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia.
Project Abstract: This project aims to document the life and works of Preecha Phinthong (1914-2003), a distinguished Thai literary and Buddhist scholar, emphasizing his role as the founder of Siritham Publishing House in Ubon Ratchathani. Established in 1963 during the Cold War, Siritham Publishing House was a key platform for promoting the language, literature, and folklore of Northeastern Thailand (also known as Isan). Preecha's extensive body of work includes around fifty published books, such as the Isan-Thai-English Dictionary and collections of Isan literature. Additionally, he left behind nearly a hundred unpublished manuscripts covering topics like oral histories, traditional medicine, and Lao-Isan folktales.
Despite his recognition as a scholar, Preecha's contributions as a publisher have been less explored. This project situates Siritham Publishing House within the broader context of Cold War geopolitics, highlighting the complex Thai-Lao literary exchanges influenced by nationalist movements and colonial histories. Interviews with Preecha’s sons—Parinya Phinthong, the current manager of Siritham, and Pratchaya Phinthong, an internationally acclaimed artist—will offer insights into his legacy. These interviews, conducted in both Thai and Isan, will be documented through audio and video recordings. The project also plans to collaborate on establishing the Preecha Phinthong Foundation, preserving his contributions to literary and Buddhist studies.
Harmon S. Recopuerto
Faculty Member, University of Antique-Main Campus, Sibalom, Antique, Philippines
Bio: I am Harmon S. Recopuerto, a faculty member at the University of Antique-Main Campus in Sibalom, Antique, Philippines. I hold a B.A. in History and a Postgraduate Diploma in Social Studies Education from the University of the Philippines. For our undergraduate thesis, we used oral history to reconstruct the disaster experiences of village heads from coastal communities in Pandan, Antique, after Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan), the strongest typhoon to hit the Philippines in 2013. For my master’s thesis, I am currently examining the representations of Filipino Muslim history and culture in Social Studies textbooks and how these representations align with the Social Studies curriculum theme on cultural sensitivity and the broader mandate for a culturally sensitive curriculum in the Philippines. At present, I am actively involved in research on marginalized sectors in the Philippines. I serve as the project leader of two fully funded studies exploring gender participation in coffee farming and the production challenges and support mechanisms for coffee growers in the upland communities of Sibalom, Antique. My research interests include environmental humanities, disaster history, local history, gender studies, and history education.
Project Abstract: My proposed project aims to contribute to ongoing efforts to preserve and critically examine the history of state violence during the Marcos regime, with a particular focus on rural areas often overlooked in the mainstream historiography of that period. This work is especially timely and relevant in light of the rise of disinformation and historical distortions, which are increasingly used to serve personal interests and political agenda. In this project, I plan to use multimodal approaches to interview two survivors of the Bacong Bridge Massacre, which occurred in Culasi, Antique, Philippines, on December 19, 1981. Although these survivors have lived to tell their stories, they have often been overlooked. Their narratives are expected to provide essential insights into how the survivors and their families dealt with the trauma, loss, and how the community remembers this painful chapter in its history. I consider this project a starting point for collecting more survivor stories, which I aim to transform into an oral history project at the University of Antique, where I am currently affiliated. In the long term, I plan to establish a "Center for Kinaray-a Studies" to house this oral history project and preserve unheard stories of survival, particularly those of victims who suffered atrocities during the Marcos regime.
Sophea Seng
Assistant Professor, CSU Long Beach
Bio: My name is Sophea Seng (សុភាសេង). My preferred gender pronouns are she/her. Born in Cambodia, I am part of the postwar ‘nonmemory’ refugee group. I have no memories of Cambodia. I completed my Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology in August 2021. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at California State University, Long Beach. I research the musical, linguistic, and religious practices of the Cambodian diaspora. Grounded in ethnographic training, my work employs multi-sited fieldwork transnationally with particular attention to reflexivity in the field. My positionality informs how I interpret the geographical and linguistic contours of the Cambodian diaspora. My first book project, Tributaries of Dharma: Buddhist Refugees and the Cambodian Diaspora in Contemporary Italy, is currently under advance contract. My research on Khmer Buddhism has been funded by the Fulbright and the ACLS Robert Ho for Buddhist Studies. My SEASLIVES research illuminates Buddhist women’s roles in the teaching and transmission of the tradition via personal narrative and in quotidian spaces, such as the wat kitchen, while expanding the boundaries of Buddhism beyond the monastery and so-called high tradition in texts, by referencing an auditory tradition of Buddhism that continues within the embodied practices.
Project Abstract: My project, Chenda: Portrait of a Cambodian Buddhist Grandma in Long Beach, California, explores how Cambodian diasporic women survivors negotiate economic changes and psychosocial stresses through their Buddhist practices. Given the early foci on socioeconomic circumstances in early Asian American studies, there is a lacuna in the focus on Buddhism in Southeast Asian studies. I will meld the early Pali textual evidence from the Therigata together with ethnographic methods and longitudinal participant observation. What would it mean to continue to frame Cambodian diasporic communities through a Buddhist gendered lens? Buddhism is already rooted in a 2,500-year history of uprootedness, displacements and reconfigurations. Cambodian women endured suffering, or tok in Khmer vernacular language (Sanskrit; Pali: dukkha) through policies of US secret bombings, forced marriages under the Khmer Rouge, mass sterilization along Khao-I-Dang and other border camps in Thailand, and resettlement under conditions of marginalization that particularly impact women. How do Cambodian Buddhist women process suffering, and while cultivating self-love through Buddhism as racial and religious minorities in the US? The women aesthetically create and embody a Buddhist world of beauty and joy. Beyond his Buddhist attire is also historically imbued with meaning that spans the Pacific through journeys to the US.
Ngoc Truong
Undergraduate Student, UC Berkeley
Bio: Ngoc Truong (she/they) is an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, majoring in Environmental Science with a focus on social sciences and minoring in South and Southeast Asian studies. Inspired by their family’s history as Vietnamese immigrants and their parents’ work in the nail salon industry, Ngoc has developed a passion for exploring the intersections of environmental racism, labor, and community resilience. Their senior thesis, titled Legacy of Chemical Exposure in the Vietnamese Diaspora: Agent Orange and Nail Salons investigates the enduring impacts of war, displacement, and occupational hazards on Vietnamese communities.
Ngoc is involved in mentorship and advocacy through the Southeast Asian Student Coalition Mentorship program, where they serve as the Curriculum and Workshop Writer, creating workshops to empower students and strengthen community bonds. They are also a facilitator and media manager for the DeCal course *Decolonizing Environmentalism* at UC Berkeley. In their free time, Ngoc enjoys hiking, photography, and recreating nostalgic Vietnamese dishes
Project Abstract: My senior Environmental Science thesis, *Legacy of Chemical Exposure Among the Vietnamese Diaspora: Agent Orange and Nail Salons,* examines the historical and long-term impacts of chemical exposure within the Vietnamese community. This study focuses on those affected by Agent Orange during the Vietnam War and individuals working in Vietnamese-owned nail salons in California, exploring health outcomes and socio-economic factors to uncover connections between war-related and occupational chemical exposure.
Using a mixed-methods approach, the research combines quantitative health data and environmental assessments with qualitative interviews. A key interviewee is a nail salon owner in Riverside, CA, with 18 years of industry experience. Born in Binh Thuan, Vietnam, during the Vietnam War, she immigrated to the U.S. as an adult. Her father, a U.S. military soldier potentially exposed to Agent Orange, provides a direct link to the study’s focus. Her interview, conducted in Vietnamese and English, will be transcribed and analyzed to contextualize lived experiences. This research highlights the intersection of racial capitalism, chemical exposure, environmental racism, and socio-economic challenges, aiming to provide valuable insights into the resilience and systemic inequities faced by the Vietnamese diaspora.
Cheralen Arroyo Valdez
PhD Student, UC Santa Cruz
Bio: Cheralen A. Valdez is a doctoral student and Regents Fellowship recipient in the Education department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her B.A. in Child and Adolescent Development with an emphasis in Research and Public Policy and a minor in Asian American Studies from San Francisco State University and her M.A. in Educational Leadership with a concentration in Emancipatory School Leadership from San Jose State University. Her academic journey and experience teaching preschool for over a decade has inspired and informed her research interests focusing on Early Childhood Education (ECE) and the intersections of Ethnic Studies and Higher Education in relation to teacher preparation. Her work aims to examine identity formation of students and teachers in ECE spaces from the teacher perspective and elicit the experiences of teachers navigating discourse around identity. Her goal is to engage in research that highlights the significance of recognizing identity issues that surface in ECE and how teachers understand their role when supporting their students' development of identity.
Project Abstract: This project aims to understand the perspectives of teachers from the Philippines and United States, examining how, if at all, U.S. imperialism is connected to Early Childhood Education (ECE)? Applying an Ethnic Studies lens with education, historian Roland Coloma’s (2013) “empire as an analytic” aims to understand how colonial histories continue to shape educational practices and the need for culturally relevant education. Through oral histories, this research further asks: what, if any traces of the afterlives of empire shapes ECE and how is ECE discussed in Philippines and US education? This project builds off this premise to consider the ways ECE has yet to grapple with notions of imperialism and colonialism, remaining steeped in whiteness. It is imperative to pursue research around pedagogical practices, historical components rooted in the US empire specifically in ECE and engage in work that is explicitly culturally responsive. By documenting the ways ECE is learned, and taught from contemporary experiences of Filipino and Filipino Americans, these stories shift attention toward a critical analysis of empire while deepening an understanding of the Filipino American diaspora, engage the utility of oral history methods, and embark on critical historicization of ECE and US imperialism salient in schooling.
Quincy Yangh
PhD Student, UC Santa Cruz
Bio: Quincy Yangh (he/him) is a first-year doctoral student in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Prior to his doctoral studies, he earned a Master’s in Environmental Management from Yale University. Quincy’s research interests include environmental anthropology, indigeneity, migration, and critical refugee studies. His doctoral research focuses on the Hmong shaman intellectual tradition, specifically how it informs Hmong environmental stewardship, medicine, and sovereignty.
Project Abstract: My SEALIVES project takes place in the mountain hills of Laos where I will interview my aunt who is a beloved Hmong shaman elder. Hmong shamans are hailed for their contributions to the greater good as generators, bridgers, and historians of knowledge that draw on many worlds. This often entails communicating with landscape and more-than-human spirits (plants, animals, among other entities). In this interview, I hope to gain a deeper understanding of how changes in geography and landscapes shape Hmong shamanism – specifically in the context of Laos/Southeast Asia. Most importantly, this interview will document her life as a Hmong shaman elder who has witnessed and lived through many historical events for the Hmong.