Year Three Grantees and Project Abstracts, 2025-2026
Agung Wicaksono
Lecturer, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Bio: Dr. Agung Wicaksono is a lecturer at the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Gadjah Mada. He completed his bachelor's degree at the Department of Cultural Anthropology UGM in 2009 and master's degree in 2011. Afterwards, Agung took a doctoral program at ASAFAS (Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies) Kyoto University from 2015 - 2019. There are strong connections between the studies at the bachelor's, master's and doctoral levels within which all of these three studies are conducted in agricultural communities living in a close range, from the farming communities living in the mountainous region in part of Dieng plateau to the farming communities living in the coastal areas of Central Java. In addition to these studies, Agung also carried out studies on the shifting cultivators communities living in the hinterland of Central Kalimantan (2012) and in the upland areas of Thailand (2020). In 2022-2023, Agung received a postdoctoral program at ISEK (Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies) University of Zurich. His project is focused on the issue of masculinization of farming communities that adhere to matrilineal land inheritance. In 2024, Agung slightly shifted his study to infrastructure in the form of the construction of sea wall and long storage in the coast of Pekalongan in relation to climate change and the socio-economic dynamics in the region.
Project abstract: Pramoedya Ananta Toer is undoubtedly the most distinguished writer in Indonesian history. He lived through many turbulent eras—from the Dutch colonial occupation and Japanese occupation to the revolutionary period, the Old Order regime, the New Order regime, and finally the post–New Order period before his passing. Indonesia’s history, marked by violence and numerous bloody tragedies, finds in Pramoedya’s writings more than mere documentation. His work offers a critical narrative that challenges and deepens our understanding of historical events. He intricately explores themes of the body, citizenship, and the role of the state in dynamic and often nuanced ways. Pramoedya authored over 50 remarkable works, translated into dozens of languages worldwide. While some may attribute this wide translation to the readability of his prose, many agree it is primarily because his writings vividly and impartially address fundamental human and humanities-related issues. Consequently, his works resonate with both people from colonizing nations and those who were colonized. Pramoedya is not the only literary talent in his family. The legacy of exceptional writing inherited from their father also flows through his younger brother, Soesilo Ananta Toer. In an interview, Soesilo remarked that no other family in the world could rightfully claim the title of "mafia sastra dunia"—or the "world literary mafia." This is no exaggeration; according to him, all his siblings are accomplished writers or literary adapters. Soesilo himself is a prolific novelist whose extensive spiritual and historical experiences have shaped him into a humanist figure, capable of producing reflective works grounded in everyday life. Over the past decade, Soesilo has successfully published 15 works—an impressive achievement for any literary figure.This project has two primary goals. The first is to discuss Soesilo’s recent writings, and the second is to reflect on his work in relation to the current conditions in contemporary Indonesia.
Alba Navas
Undergraduate student, UC Berkeley
Bio: Alba Navas is currently a senior at the University of California, Berkeley pursuing a dual degree in sociology and educational sciences. She aims to learn about different societal factors that impact individuals or groups: ways of thinking, culture, education and life. Sociology for her is not just a means of understanding, but also a way to know when to step back and listen to others.
Throughout her academic career Alba has found a cross section between education and sociology. This finding has led her to a passion for education reform inside and outside of the United States. The continuous studying of sociology not only informs her work, but is a vital factor she considers as change can have a large impact on communities. Her goal is to introduce improvements in education through a sociological perspective to honor the communities and individuals she serves in an informed and non-extractive way.
Project abstract: This research is based on an individual with a Southeast Asian background who combines her cultural practices and American practices within health and wellness in order to improve her overall health. The interviews I will conduct with her will reveal not only what she takes from each side but also what inspired her to do so. In this analysis I aim to understand how both practices can interact with one another to create a more holistic approach to health.
Currently, the majority of research in this area is based on herbal medicine and how that practice has continued. However, in this research I aim to more specifically investigate both cultures’ health practices this individual has lived in. Rather than focusing on one practice or the other, this is more about the interplay of both. Wellness and health are not just looking for temporary fixes or approaches to when one is already ill, it is more about life long health and longevity.
Ann Ngoc Tran
UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA
Bio: Ann Ngoc Tran is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies and Asian Languages & Cultures at UCLA. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California in 2025. An interdisciplinary historian of Vietnam’s multiple diasporas in the late-20th century, she is currently working on a book titled, Non-Arrival: Histories of Drift and Disappearance after the Vietnam War, which seeks to denaturalize the relationship between refugees and resettlement by examining the multi-modal history of oceanic movements into, across, and under the South China Seas. Her dissertation received the 2025 Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize for Best Dissertation by the American Studies Association.
Project abstract: For this project, I intend to conduct a one-on-one life history interview with Trần Quang Cử, who is my uncle on my father’s side. Dr. Cử was part of a small cohort of talented Vietnamese students selected by the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to study in the USSR after the end of the Vietnam War to promote improved relations between Hanoi and Moscow. He currently resides in Vũng Tàu in southern Vietnam, though he often vacations in Bangkok, Thailand, during the year. I intend to travel to Southeast Asia in Spring or Summer 2026 to meet him to conduct his oral history and acquire photographs of his robust collection of Russian books, zines, and monographs. For his protection, I will be using a pseudonym and will only be recording the audio of the interview and transcribing his life story in Vietnamese. The interview will be divided into four sections: (1) Life During the War, (2) Family Dynamics and School Life After 1975, (3) Studying in the Soviet Union, (4) Post-USSR Work and Civilian Life. Should travel disruptions arise, we will shift the method of interviewing to Zoom.
Baron Lim
Undergraduate, UC Berkeley
Bio: Baron Lim is currently a senior undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley studying anthropology. He is originally from Long Beach, California, and is the child of refugees from Cambodia. As a child, he had grown up within the Khmer community, and started efforts to bridge the gaps between generations and culture. Through his experiences, he hopes to highlight generational trauma and the experiences of both Khmer and Khmer-American communities. Coming from a community often riddled in silence, Baron strives to listen and archive stories and memory, so the future generations will not forget.
Project abstract: In the context of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1975, the Khmer people experienced mass atrocity. Structural impacts of war led to displacement and the large communities of diaspora. The diaspora often lives in a frozen idea of Cambodia before /during the war. While the people who stayed had to keep pushing and living in the country they bled in. The conversation is based on the perspective of the immigrant community on the refugee community. How do Khmer immigrants perceive Khmer refugees through the lens of war-induced trauma and memory?
The research aims to explore the thoughts of Khmer immigrants and their ideas surrounding the Khmer refugee community. The interviewee has recently immigrated to America, and is often involved with the refugee community. Through a series of interviews and questions, I hope to compare and explore the perception of experience as someone who has come from modern-day Cambodia, in conversation with those who had left 50 years ago.
Chun Wang
PhD Student, UC Berkeley & UCSF
Bio: Chun Wang is a graduate student in the Joint Program in Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley and UCSF. With an interest in gender, migration, and health, Wang plans to use ethnographic research and multimedia methods to collaborate with communities in East and Southeast Asia. Through the SEALIVES project (and in the long run), Wang hopes to listen to individual stories and voices, learn from theorizing that takes place outside academia, and work with communities to legitimize creative methodologies as critical knowledge production.
Project abstract: While workforce participation and gender-affirming care are relatively more accessible for trans* communities in Thailand, legal recognition and health justice remain structurally challenging. Specifically, visibility and needs of nonbinary individuals are marginalized since the medical infrastructure refuses to think beyond male-female and normal-abnormal binaries despite scientific evidence that suggests multiplicity. This oral history project will interview one to two non-binary individuals about their experiences of the medical system and journeys of seeking recognition in Thailand. Insights emerging from these individual stories will be synthesized and produced as multilingual zines, which can then be passed among grassroots organizations and local clinics to empower Thai and transnational migrant communities to advocate for themselves.
Dimas Iqbal Romadhon
Postdoctoral Researcher, UC Davis
Bio: Dimas is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Anthropology at UC Davis and a member of the editorial board for Reading Decoloniality, an inter-institutional research hub hosted by the University of Warwick. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from University of Washington, with a certificate in Science, Technology, and Society Studies. A medical anthropologist, his scholarship covers cultural, political, and ethical issues at the intersection of medicine, technology, and religion, with a specific geographic focus in Indonesia. He is also a folklore enthusiast, having published, among many, a compilation of Madurese folktales using magical realism as the critical lens titled "Jokotole hingga Syaikhona Kholil" (2015) written in his native Indonesian language.
Project abstract: This project is part of a broader research initiative to document the traditional ecological and medical knowledge of the Mentawai people, an indigenous ethnic group inhabiting the Mentawai Archipelago in Indonesia. The long-term geographical isolation of the archipelago has fostered a high degree of endemic biodiversity alongside the preservation of a distinct cultural system, particularly concerning illness etiology and healing practices. This SEALIVES project will focus on documenting the production of illness knowledge and health authority through the life histories of two respected Mentawai shamans (kerei) who have served their communities for over three decades. The interviews will document their pathways to spiritual authority, the processes of knowledge transmission, explanatory models of illness, and the forms of healing rituals to address those illnesses. Furthermore, the interviews will also document local spiritual beings within Mentawai cosmology, including their characteristics, the illnesses they cause, and their common resemblance to endemic animals. Consequently, the final product will also include accounts on human-animal interactions in the Mentawai forest. I will collaborate with a local youth organization, Sinuruk Mattaoi, to ensure that this project respects all local norms and that the knowledge generated from the documentation will remain within the community.
Emma Goh
PhD Student, UC Berkeley
Bio: Emma Goh is a PhD student in City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research investigates how AI-driven demands for data are reconfiguring territorial planning and spatial governance across Southeast Asia. She examines how interjurisdictional rivalries and alliances among states, utilities, and private capital shape the uneven regionalization of digital infrastructure and the rescaling of governance across the region. Emma holds a Master of City Planning from UC Berkeley and a Bachelor of Arts in Urban Studies from Yale-NUS College.
Project abstract: The Singapore story of transformation—from sleepy fishing village to glitzy global metropolis—is well told. What is often overlooked, however, is that this “third world to first” narrative is not homogenous; it is spatially bound to mainland Singapore. Beyond the mainland lie more than 60 offshore islands that were once home to indigenous communities, the Orang Pulau. My project asks: What remains of the Orang Pulau of Singapore? How have they responded to the destruction, displacement, and erasure enacted upon them? How have they navigated what it means to live as Orang Pulau when so much of their world has been absorbed into the mainland? How have they sought to keep the spirit of the sea—jiwa laut—alive as they rehabilitate the last fragments of their indigenous terra firma?
To explore these questions, I will conduct a series of interviews with Nor Syazwan Abdul Majid, a direct descendant of the Orang Pulau who spent his childhood in his grandparents’ home on Pulau Ubin. Wan is a heritage activist and community organizer who founded “Wan’s Ubin Journal” in 2018 to reclaim and preserve Orang Pulau identity. These interviews will be recorded and used to produce: (1) an annotated transcript and (2) an audio tour of Pulau Ubin, spotlighting the stories of the Orang Pulau told through Wan, both of which will be made publicly accessible.
Francis Commerçon
PhD Student, UC Berkeley
Bio: Francis A. Commerçon is a second year PhD student in the Environmental Science, Policy and Management Department at University of California, Berkeley. Through an ethnography of biodiversity conservation in Menglun township, Xishuangbanna Prefecture, China, his dissertation research examines the ways the academy and the market economy place value differently on scientific and non-scientific expertise. In this tropical river valley just north of the China-Lao border, Francis’s analysis stems from the stories of villagers and scientists that illuminate four social dimensions of local biodiversity conservation: 1) extension and participation in sustainable rubber agroforestry research, 2) epistemic empowerment and marginalization through ethnobotanical research, 3) inter-scalar negotiations of community-based ecotourism development, 4) opportunities and barriers to socioeconomic advancement via scientific employment. Francis began studying conservation in Xishuangbanna ten years ago as an undergraduate biology major studying cultural wildlife use and eco-friendly rubber production. His academic and personal journeys are much indebted to the hospitality and encouragement of his research collaborators at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Gardens and his Tai and Akha friends in Menglun.
Project abstract: The SEALIVES small grant will support Francis to interview elder Akha and Tai-Lue villagers about their contributions to scientific research in Menglun township through formal employment and informal knowledge exchange. In particular, these elders’ life histories will center their roles in the scientific advancement of rubber cultivation techniques and the development of botanical knowledge for medicinal and industrial applications. Accounts of southeast Asian science, technology, and development seldomly foreground the ethnic minority villagers who are integral to the process. This research aims to enrich the history of science in this region by foregrounding the contribution of non-scientific expertise in knowledge production and by contextualizing villagers’ engagement with science within the cultural and socioeconomic opportunities and constraints that shape their personal ambitions. The research advances an analysis of scientific modernization that understands non-scientists as active agents in the processes of research and development.
Gray Brakke
PhD Student, UC Berkeley
Bio: Gray is a third-year PhD student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. His research interests include peripheral urbanization, (post)socialisms, property rights, housing, extralegality, and comparative urban studies. His doctoral research investigates these issues in Hanoi, where he studies postsocialist land and property valorization. His dissertation examines the role of self-built housing in framing property rights and urban land markets in Hanoi during and after Vietnam’s transition to market economy (đổi mới). He holds a BA with honors in Urban Studies from Brown University and a MSc in Urbanisation and Development from the London School of Economics.
Project abstract: This project consists of a life history of Trịnh Duy Luân, a retired urban sociologist who helmed several research projects on housing and urbanization in Vietnam during the đổi mới period. He has authored two Vietnamese textbooks on urban sociology (2005, 2009), edited a volume of seminal essays by Western planning and housing scholars (1996), and co-authored one of the only books that addresses self-built housing and đổi mới (1998). He also co-edited one of the only English-language texts on Vietnamese self-building (Evertsz 2000). Ông Luân's life history and academic career offer crucial insights into the intellectual history underpinning the Vietnamese state’s approach to housing during this period. After completing a doctorate in sociology in Moscow in 1988, ông Luân ascended through the ranks of the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (VASS) in Hanoi, becoming Director of the Institute of Sociology. Ông Luân’s work would have certainly influenced the state’s new housing and land laws in the 1990s, to say nothing of its academic impact.
João Paulo Doblon Reginaldo
Assistant Professor, University of the Philippines Baguio
Bio: João Paulo D. Reginaldo is an Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History and Philosophy, College of Social Sciences, University of the Philippines Baguio. His scholarship centers on the histories of the Cordillera and Northern Luzon, and on the lived experiences of ethnic minorities in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. He is the author of a book and has published numerous articles and book chapters on ethnohistory and Indigenous histories—particularly of the Karao and Iwak peoples—as well as on food history, local history, and the southern Cordillera in the eighteenth century. His works have appeared in respected journals, including The Cordillera Review, The Chinese Journal, and the National Historical Commission Journal. Beyond research and writing, he has served UP Baguio in various administrative capacities, including as Chair of the Program for Indigenous Cultures (2020–2021), Student Relations Officer (2021–2022), and currently as Director of UP Ugnayan ng Pahinungód Baguio, the university’s volunteer service office.
Project abstract: Baguio City has long resonated as a forum of critical voices, where educators, writers, artists, activists, students, and elders insist that history be told not from imperial pedestals and/or metropolitan vantage points, but from the valleys and streets where lives are lived, contested, and remade. This project maps that intricate civic soundscape, tracing the interwoven lives, institutions, and practices that have shaped Cordilleran historical consciousness from the late twentieth century to the present. Among the constellation of personalities is Zenaida Brigida Hamada-Pawid, widely known as Manang Briggs, an Indigenous intellectual whose interventions in education, historiography, and governance exemplify a broader ethic of principled dissent and grounded service.
Titled Wit, Whim, and Will of a Woman, the project situates Manang Briggs as one among multiple figures who unsettled comfortable narratives and insisted that Indigenous voices remain central to history-making and public governance. As a former educator at the University of the Philippines Baguio and co-author of A People’s History of Benguet (1985), she contributed to collective efforts that interrogated colonial archives and repositioned Benguet - and by extension, Cordillera - as a historical center rather than a periphery. Her later leadership of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (2011-2013) brought these epistemic commitments into the contested realm of governance. By introducing herself as a “janitor” sweeping Kennon Road in one of the Baguio City Council meetings, she reminds us that labor, intellect, and service are inseparable.
Through ethically grounded, multimodal oral history interviews in Baguio City, this project archives a living constellation of Indigenous leadership, political imagination, and civic creativity capturing voices while they still speak.
Kalyan Houn
Researcher & PhD Student, Royal University of Phnom Penh
Bio: Ms. Houn Kalyan is a Cambodian researcher and MEL specialist with over 15 years of experience conducting qualitative and quantitative research focused on social protection, agrarian change, indigenous rights, and community development. She has led socio-economic surveys, participatory action research, and stakeholder consultations for national ministries, international agencies, and NGOs, including the Ministry of Environment and the International Labour Organization. Her expertise includes life-history interviewing, community engagement, and data analysis to inform inclusive policy and program design. Kalyan is currently pursuing a PhD in Social Work, with a dissertation examining indigenous peoples, development interventions, and social policy in Cambodia.
Her academic work includes a forthcoming article in the Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia on the impacts of COVID-19 on Kuy agricultural livelihoods, contributing to debates on social protection and indigenous people in which had just published November, 2025.Her growing interest in life-history methods reflects a broader commitment to understanding people not only as “data points” within development programs but as individuals whose lives carry complexity, emotion, knowledge, and agency. She views crafting life histories as an ethical practice—one that honours personal narratives, foregrounds marginalized voices, and reveals how structural forces link with everyday struggles and aspirations.
Project abstract: This project illuminates the micro-politics of development by situating individual life stories within broader state frameworks. It shows how official recognition and welfare programs depoliticize structural exclusion while Kuy villagers strategically preserve solidarity and reciprocity as quiet forms of resistance. By integrating Ferguson’s anti-politics machine, Scott’s “weapons of the weak,” and feminist insights on standpoint and intersectionality, this project indicates how gender, class, and indigeneity can reveal textured insights into indigenous experiences, showing them to be far more than symbolic references to imagined pasts, but active negotiations of living futures that retain elements of community care, embodied knowledge, and reciprocity. By providing insights, the project advances understanding in terms of its large contribution to demonstrate what often appear as depoliticized programs of inclusion do not erase indigenous agency, rather, in the contact zone between bureaucratic exclusion and Kuy resilience, new forms of negotiation, reciprocity, and embodied knowledge emerge.
Lena Chen
PhD Candidate, UC Berkeley
Bio: Born to immigrants from Kaiping, China, Lena Chen was raised in the San Gabriel Valley, an ethnoburb of Los Angeles built on the unceded territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva people. She is a writer, curator, scholar, and multidisciplinary artist. As a Performance Studies Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, she studies the performance practices of Asian American sex workers in Los Angeles and New York City. A recipient of the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, she earned a MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and BA from Harvard University.
Awarded Mozilla Foundation’s Creative Media Award, her artistic practice explores race, gender, labor, and sexuality often through the lens of her own experience as a mother, former sex worker, and survivor of revenge porn. Her work has appeared at Anthology Film Archives, Carnegie Museum of Art, Sheffield DocFest, Transmediale, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, and other venues. She is a founding member of the artist collective, MATERNAL FANTASIES, and co-founder of JADED, the largest Asian American and Pacific Islander arts platform in Western Pennsylvania. She founded the BAD ASIANS Working Group at UC Berkeley's Center for Race & Gender.
Project abstract: My project examines how contemporary Asian American artists rework racialized tropes, such as the “Dragon Lady,” to confront the psychic wounds of racism and to imagine liberatory queer and feminist futures. My fieldwork with Asian American sex workers, artists, and organizers in Los Angeles and New York explores how histories of immigrant labor, exclusion, and surveillance continue to shape cultural production and everyday life in these communities. Drawing from my longstanding relationships with these interlocutors and my own background as a former sex worker and practicing artist, I take a mixed-methods approach that encompasses autoethnography, archival research, oral history, participant observation, and performance and visual analysis. Blurring the boundaries of performance art, relational aesthetics, and body art, how do Asian American sex workers expose the constructed and fragile nature of race, gender, and sexuality? What do these “immigrant acts” reveal about desires, anxieties, and contradictions embedded in whiteness, patriarchy, and nationhood? Departing from traditional art histories, I analyze how artworks emerge from networks of mutual aid and organizing, offering a new framework for understanding Asian American cultural production as collective, relational, and movement-based. I ask: how do Asian American sex workers use performance to reclaim agency and advance more just racial, gender, and labor conditions in the United States?
Nguyễn Nguyệt Cầm
Faculty, UC Berkeley
Bio: Nguyễn Nguyệt Cầm attended Hanoi National University, earning a undergraduate degree in English language and literature. After moving to California in 1995, she entered the M.A. program in the Group in Asian Studies at UC Berkeley where she completed a thesis on the history of spy fiction in the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). She has taught Vietnamese language and literature at UC Berkeley for more than two decades.
Nguyễn Nguyệt Cầm has completed numerous literary translations, including Vietnamese versions of E.B.White's Charlotte's Web and Trumpet of the Swan (Kim Đồng Publishing House) and English language versions of Vũ Trọng Phụng's novel Dumb Luck (University of Michigan Press), a volume of short stories by Nguyễn Huy Thiệp entitled Crossing the River (Curbstone Press), and the collection of Vietnamese folk-tales, Two Cakes Fit for a King (University of Hawaii Press). Her most recent essay which she co-authored with Peter Zinoman is a study of the cannonization of Nguyễn Du's The Tale of Kiều for national epics, edited by David Wallace. Nguyễn Nguyệt Cầm has also served for the past 20 years as the Vietnamese language editor for Journal of Vietnamese Studies.
Quynh Thuy Truong
PhD student, University of California, San Diego
Bio: Quynh Thuy Truong is a second-year PhD student in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She holds an MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of California, Riverside and a BA in International Studies from Ewha Womans University. Her research revolves around inter-Asian fandoms, youth movements, and queer cultures in intersection with (post)socialism, authoritarian politics, nationalism, and politics of embodiments in general. Quynh Thuy Truong employs multisensory ethnography and experiments with other creative methods in her works.
Project abstract: This project examines how fan practices of queer women who gather around queer idols negotiate and challenge authoritarian politics in Vietnam. In the last two decades, the well-beloved media flows coming out of Japan, South Korea, China, Thailand, among others, have given rise to the emergence of inter-Asian fan cultures. While the scholarship explains how becoming a fan of such inter-Asian idols signifies a rising middle-class status attuned to pan-Asian aesthetics of development, my project offers a different story. I focus on fan communities of queer women who bear the weight of gendered social stigma and political censorship in the context of Vietnam. I zoom into the under-acknowledged role of affects and sensations integral to fan practices in building a counter-hegemonic space for these queer women to experiment with a new way of feeling and sensing. In the future, this SEALIVEs project shall extend into my dissertation to examine how post-socialist authoritarian power is reproduced through emotional discipline and how the intervention of inter-Asian fan cultures troubles the capacity of affects and senses in maintaining such power.
Using a life history approach, I will interview two working-class women in their 30s serving as the administrators of Vietnamese fanclubs of Thai Girls Love actresses. These interviews shall illuminate how their lived experiences led them to idolize queer celebrities from other Asian spaces and organize fan communities for Vietnamese youth. To capture their affective experiences, I use multisensory ethnography by inviting them to co-construct the interview transcripts with sonic, visual, and photographic indexes.
Rogério Sávio
Researcher, Centro Nacional Chega (CNC)
Bio: I am a history researcher who has conducted studies on the history of Timorese women during the Indonesian occupation, in collaboration with the Timorese Women’s Popular Organization (OPMT), the first Timorese women’s organization, as well as other research projects with memory institutions, including the National Center Chega (CNC) and the Ministry of Education in East Timor. I hold a bachelor’s degree in history from Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and am currently pursuing a master’s degree in education at the National University of Timor Lorosa’e (UNTL), in partnership with the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil.
Project abstract: "Everyday Lives of East Timorese Women in the Context of Political Change (1960–1999)"
This research continues two oral history projects documenting the everyday lives of East Timorese women during late Portuguese colonialism (1960–1974), the 1974 decolonization period, and the Indonesian occupation (1975–1999). The first project resulted in a book in a Tetun language and an English article presenting accounts of several Timorese women, while the ongoing second project focuses on the period around 25 April 1974, collecting oral histories in Dili with support from Centro Nacional Chega! and the University of Coimbra. These projects reveal how women of all social classes played essential roles in sustaining families and communities amid political change, violence, and the struggle for independence, highlighting the contributions of ordinary women that are often overlooked in research focused on male resistance heroes or women leaders.
Song Lee
Professor/Associate Dean, Fresno State
Bio: Dr. Song E. Lee, Ph.D., LMFT, serves as Associate Dean for the Kremen School of Education and Human Development at Fresno State, where she has been a faculty member since 2006. A proud Fresno State alumna, she also holds a B.A. from UC Davis and a Ph.D. in Counselor Education from North Carolina State University. A licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Dr. Lee previously served as a full professor in the Department of Counselor Education and Rehabilitation, where she taught, mentored faculty and students, coordinated programs, and led successful accreditation efforts.
Her leadership includes serving as Department Chair, program coordinator, internship coordinator, President of the Kremen Faculty Assembly, and founder of the Freedom Community Church Wellness Program. Dr. Lee’s publications focus on Hmong American mental health, identity development, domestic violence, and educational experiences.
Committed to strengthening community wellness and cultural continuity, she collaborates extensively with local organizations and provides pro bono support to the Hmong community. She is also dedicated to preserving intergenerational knowledge through recording oral histories of Hmong elders. Dr. Lee champions educational equity, well-being, and the success of all individuals.
Project abstract: This project documents and analyzes the lives and practices of two elder Hmong women herbalists whose knowledge has endured through war, displacement, and cultural transformation from the 1970s to the present. Through long-format oral history interviews, it preserves endangered herbal knowledge, illuminates its evolving relevance, and centers women’s resilience as they navigate patriarchal structures across both homeland and diaspora contexts. Because Hmong herbal expertise has traditionally been transmitted orally, it is increasingly vulnerable to loss as younger generations turn toward modern medicine; recording these narratives ensures that herbal medicine—an anchor of healing, identity, and cultural continuity—remains accessible to future generations, scholars, and community members. The two narrators illustrate both continuity and divergence across transnational settings: Yer Lor, a 79-year-old shaman and herbalist in Fresno, California, and Mai Houa Yang, a 61-year-old herbalist sustaining her livelihood in rural Laos. Together, their stories reveal how Hmong women maintain healing practices amid migration, gendered expectations, and historical upheaval. Culminating in a book manuscript with photographic documentation, this archive contributes to cultural preservation and advances scholarly understanding of Hmong women’s knowledge systems.
Veronica Sison
PhD Student, UC Berkeley
Bio: Veronica Sison is a PhD student at the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies.
Project abstract: When we speak of the so-called “Golden Age” of Southeast Asian Studies, a period fueled by Cold War funding from U.S. foundations and government agencies, we usually focus on the experiences of scholars—their texts, theories, and interventions. Yet the field has never been theirs alone. While archival research is often described as solitary labor, in fact it is collaborative. To immerse oneself in thousands of bundles is reliant on the unacknowledged labor of the librarians and archivists who organize, retrieve, and safeguard materials. And yet these key agents of intellectual production are often merely consigned to acknowledgments.
This project supplements my broader research on postwar knowledge production in the Philippines. It seeks to recover the world of Philippine librarians and archivists in the late 1960s to early 1980s and to interrogate not only the technical but also the gendered dimension of their work. The proposed study focuses on the lives of librarian Fe Angela Verzosa and archivist Rose Mendoza, who often mediated between Southeast Asian governments and scholars of Western institutions. They decided what to preserve and how to make the past accessible in the context of a nation that had to be rebuilt postwar. This project seeks to understand: 1.) What really constituted the lifeworld of librarians and archivists? 2.) What forms of knowledge, and what kinds of relationships--collaborative, conflictual, intimate-- emerged in these encounters?
Vincent Tran
PhD Student, UC Berkeley
Bio: Vincent Tran is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. His research interests include postcolonial state formation in Vietnam, Vietnamese labor history, and postwar Overseas Vietnamese politics. Before entering academia, Vincent spent seven years as a community organizer in Southern California, organizing working-class immigrant communities to advance immigrant, housing, and economic justice. He has led successful campaigns that secured Orange County's first rent control policy and introduced California's first citywide immigrant voting rights ballot measure. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from UC Berkeley.
Project abstract: In 1988, a wave of liberal democracy movements in Communist countries in Eastern Europe and Asia prompted the Overseas Vietnamese community across the globe to debate what a post-Communist Vietnam would look like and whether reconciliation and harmony should occur with the Vietnamese Communist Party. This project examines these debates from 1988 to 1991 through the lens of Thông Luận, a leading Overseas Vietnamese Anti-Communist periodical that advocated for pluralistic democracy and nonviolent regime change.
This research challenges previous depictions of Vietnamese Anti-Communism as monolithic, stagnant, and reactionary and instead argues it is a political ideology that is multifaceted and evolving. I will conduct oral history interviews with two central figures: Nguyễn Gia Kiểng (Thông Luận's political theoretician) and Phạm Ngọc Lân (Thông Luận's former editor-in-chief and managing editor). Through these interviews, I aim to reconstruct the intellectual genealogy of the debate on reconciliation and harmony within Vietnamese Anti-Communist thought and trace how visions of democracy evolved among diaspora leaders during the Cold War. In addition, I plan to photograph and scan materials (e.g., photos, fliers, brochures) to make Thông Luận’s work more accessible to researchers and the public.
Xiyao Fu
PhD candidate, National University of Singapore
Bio: Xiyao Fu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at National University of Singapore. She holds a master’s degree in environmental science from the Yale School of the Environment, specializing in environmental anthropology and agrarian studies. She works with upland Indigenous people in Southwest China and Northern Thailand to understand biocultural diversity conservation, global commodity chains, and more-than-human politics.
Project abstract: This research examines indigenous entrepreneurs’ life history of local-global encounters at the emerging specialty coffee network in Chiang Rai—both hosting thousands of coffee shops and becoming the top specialty Arabica-producing province in Thailand. What does coffee mean for the upland communities themselves? How have upland entrepreneurs actively mediated the relationships among land, people, and the global market? I address these questions through biographical interviews with upland women entrepreneurs, who are rarely spokespersons in family/tribal entrepreneurship but central to my research. First, as male entrepreneurs spend increasing time away for institutional trainings and marketing, women spend more time within their upland communities, witnessing local socioecological change. Second, whereas entrepreneurs proclaim that “coffee is everything for us,” the reverse is true for my women interlocutors, who attend to everyday demands in multigenerational entrepreneurship as sister/daughter/wife, where coffee is not everything but a means to relational ends. Lastly, while poster child entrepreneurs are busy translating ethnic coffee and culture into the global market, less visible women are translating this foreign crop into the everyday fabrics of their communities and agroecology. Therefore, their life history could provide critical commentary to prevailing marketing scripts and reveal dynamic meanings of coffee in emic and embodied terms.
Zhehang Zhang
PhD Student, UC Berkeley
Bio: Originally from a once-industrial region in Northeast Asia, I grew up in a landscape where “development” was not just a policy slogan but something that closed factories, opened new projects, and quietly redefined whose futures were thinkable. Those experiences led me to questions of how large-scale economic and political changes are lived, interpreted, and morally evaluated in everyday life. My earlier work examined development and restructuring in contemporary Asia, focusing on how people navigate ideas of progress, decline, and justice in changing local economies.
I am now a PhD student in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, working broadly on the political economy of development, social change, and the lived experience of global capitalism in East and Southeast Asia. Across my research, I am especially interested in how state projects, markets, and moral worlds become entangled over time, and how ordinary people narrate and negotiate these transformations.
Project abstract: In the simplest terms, my project investigates how the long afterlives of state-led development and market reform shape contemporary connections between East and Southeast Asia. Rather than starting from official plans or economic indicators, it treats development as something experienced and contested in everyday life. I am interested in how earlier models of planning, collective responsibility, and state protection interact with newer logics of competition, mobility, and individual risk, and in how these layered histories inform contemporary understandings of prosperity, inequality, and obligation.
Methodologically, the project draws on qualitative approaches such as interviews, ethnographic observation, and engagement with historical materials. Conceptually, it brings debates on development, postsocialism, and global capitalism into conversation with Southeast Asian perspectives on history, community, and the future. In doing so, it seeks to offer a more grounded account of how people in the region make sense of development across generations, and how these understandings may open up or constrain alternative pathways ahead. I am grateful to the SEALIVES project for the opportunity to explore these questions through lived, human-centred perspectives from and about Southeast Asia.