2025-26 GRANT RECIPIENTS
Decolonize, Deimperialize, De-Cold War: Unsettling Asian Studies
Thinking With Land as a Collective Space
Puerto Rico in Motion
Extractivism in its Longue Durée: Materials, Bodies, Spaces
Borders of Memory: The Politics of Migration, Diaspora, and Colonial Legacies
Thresholds of Sovereignty: Perforations in the Fabric of Global Capital
DECOLONIZE, DEIMPERIALIZE, DE-COLD WAR: UNSETTLING ASIAN STUDIES
Fifteen years ago, cultural studies scholar Kuan-Hsing Chen called for a decolonization, deimperialization, and de-Cold War of Asian Studies in his book Asia as Method (2010). He pushed for a transformation of subjectivity—particularly in terms of Taiwanese national identity, which had foreclosed Third World consciousness and critical self-reflectiom—and urged focultural studies to move beyond postcolonial studies. Postcolonial studies, he critiqued, had become entangled in its resentment towards the West and had thus bound its critique and knowledge production, ironically, to Western frameworks. “Asia as method,” then, is a shift of objects of identification and frames of reference across Asia, situating the West only as a fragment of subject formation and history rather than the totalizing basis. The goal for our reading group is to extend upon Chen’s call to multiply our reference points and transcend binaries of West/Other, researcher/native informant, to generate new understandings.
As scholars who move in and out of what may be considered Asian Studies and Area Studies, we work beyond the nation-state as the assumed unit of study by drawing from various analytical frameworks and emerging fields: diaspora and critical refugee studies, transpacific and global history, Indigenous studies, Dalit studies, feminist geography, environmental studies, settler colonial studies, borderland studies, and literary and cultural studies. These interdisciplinary approaches compel us to ask: How might we unsettle the epistemic boundaries of “Asia” as a geopolitical and disciplinary construct? What does it mean to engage with Asian Studies through frameworks of borderlands, diaspora, and feminist geography? And how can we reimagine transnational solidarities that do not reproduce the imperial cartographies of Cold War epistemes?
We will begin by grounding our readings with the analytical frameworks of scholars who urge us to critically interrogate power relations in methodology, archives, and knowledge production (Guha, 2002; Chakrabarty, 2008; Stoler, 2009; Chen, 2010; Lowe, 2015; Azoulay, 2019). This will be further articulated through explorations of how colonial power and knowledge across Asia is intimately tied to constructions of gender and kinship (McClintock,1995; Kang, 2020). Furthermore, we will nuance our thinking on power through interrogations of caste and the offerings of Dalit methodology (Rege, 2013; Paik, 2022). Then, through the lens of critical refugee studies and diaspora studies, we will examine the excesses of the normative nation-state through sites such as military posts (Gonzalez, 2013) and the refugee camp (Gandhi, 2022; Abourhame, 2025), and how such sites of mobility and resettlement reify settler logics (Day, 2016; Hu-Pegues, 2021). This will expand into consideration of borderlands and non-human relations, that are unsettled or cannot be settled, to emphasize how identities, kinships and communities transcend human-imposed regional and national borders (Govindrajan, 2018; Gohain, 2020; Pachuau, 2022). Finally, we will explore alternative methodologies by engaging with the impasses of translation and legible knowledge through Indigenous cosmologies, solidarities and affinities that rupture settler logics, new conceptual vocabularies from across the Global South, and appreciating the supernatural and hauntings that urge us to imagine otherwise (Smith, 1999; Le, 2019; Menon, 2022; Nguyen-Vo, 2024). Through these interventions, we aim not only to provincialise the legacies of area studies and challenge the nation-state framework, but to forge more capacious and generative frames of reference, relations, and orientations.
Members
Sarita Pariyar—Department of Asian Studies
Suraj Kushwaha—Department of Anthropology
Edna Wan— Department of Literatures in English
Saomai Phuong Nguyen—Department of History
Amorette Lyngwa—Department of History
Namfon Choochan— Department of History
THINKING WITH LAND AS A COLLECTIVE SPACE
As of May 2025, over 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been martyred by the U.S.-funded Israeli genocidal campaign. In the U.S, the Trump Administration is escalating its attacks against U.S. immigrants and international people, Black and Indigenous people of color, and queer and trans people. In both cases (and in many others), nation-state governments are operating through structures of imperialism, racism, and colonialism in order to escalate systematic violence against peoples whose existences threaten their power. At the same time, within the colonial borders of present-day Palestine-Israel (hereafter Palestine) and the United States, these peoples continue to exist. Historically and today, they cultivate and embody antithetical ways of thinking and being in the world. While nation-state narratives and archives attempt to violently suppress them, through literature, art, music, and everyday practices, these peoples persist. Therefore, our reading group seeks to learn from and be in conversation with writers, artists, musicians, and others who epistemically and materially challenge the perceived hegemony of empire and its illogics. As a result of our wide range of academic backgrounds and research interests, we approach this mission from a variety of mixed methodologies united by core theoretical commitments and divided by geographical area.
Based on our members’ research areas, we are grounded in three primary geographical regions: Palestine, the U.S, and Latin America. In light of that, we first establish a theoretical basis in international Indigenous-led environmental humanities. We begin by thinking with Albelda et al. (2018), who offers a critical survey of contemporary ecological thought across Latin America. Camezzana (2020) completes this survey with an emphasis on artists' resistance movements. Abu-Lughod (2007) and Manna (2020) next guide us through thinking with the land of Palestine under the settler-colonial politics of property and (re)memory. Finally, a dive into U.S. Black and Indigenous feminist solidarities (Day (2015), Frazier (2016), Goffe (2022)) will complete our theoretical foundation. After rooting ourselves in the company of international environmental humanities thinkers, we will then think with anthropologists, writers, visual artists, and musicians who belong to and/or work with contemporary Indigenous communities across our geographical regions of focus. Finally, we will end our reading by examining case studies of international and transnational land justice movements across rural, urban, and coastal communities in Palestine, the U.S, and Latin America.
By approaching indigenous thinking within an international environmental humanities context from such a wide variety of historically non-traditional sources, we also look forward to enriching our own scholarship. While our methodologies and regional focuses vary, we are united by a shared commitment to thinking through everyday embodiments of living beyond the violent prescriptions of empire.
Members
María Alejandra Bulla Clavijo—Department of Music
Carla Rangel García—Department of Art
Katie Rueff—Robert S. Harrison College Scholar Program
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PUERTO RICO IN MOTION: ENDURANCE AND IMPERIAL RUINATION IN THE BODY
The Puerto Rican body is discursively trapped within a logic of stagnation that mimics the ways in which the nation exists in the imaginary on and off the island. Saddled with debt, economically unproductive, culturally stagnated, the body becomes one with the colony, strapped to the neoliberal notions of progress and development which guide the governance of Puerto Rico to this day. How can we think beyond the body-colony, challenging the discourse of stagnation made almost canonical through the history of Puerto Rican cultural production? How do we reconfigure a way of imagining the Puerto Rican body that has existed since the beginning of colonial time? What do we become, then, at the end of colonial time? What do we become when sea levels have risen to our belly button; the coasts have all eroded, when the creases of our foreheads have become as volatile as tectonic plates, and when we mourn the absence of those who call the archipelago home?Or, in the words of Yarimar Bonilla, “[w]ho will be the political subject of the postdisaster future?”
Our reading group takes the notion of body-colony from Rocío Zambrana to track its emergence and manifestations by juxtaposing current scholarship against canonical Puerto Rican (and broader Caribbean) texts of the 20th century with the goal of elaborating alternative form of flow and movement that challenge the discourse of stagnation and the imperial choreographies imposed upon the island and the bodies that inhabit it by the United States. To establish a critical vocabulary for our work, we will start by reading contemporary scholars engaged with the notion of body-colony whose work directly examines and problematizes the ways in which the body-colony is painted as stagnant (Zambrana, Bonilla, Ruiz, ife). We will then transition to canonical works of Puerto Rican and Caribbean studies that thematize stagnation (Pedreira, Sánchez) or movement (Benítez Rojo, Glissant) in order to understand the underlying discourse that constructs the Puerto Rican body today. Finally, we will move to cultural production across different genres and disciplines, including but not limited to fiction (Figueroa Vázquez), newspaper columns and essays (Ballou), performances, poetry (Salas Rivera), and digital culture (Arroyo), who trace the genealogy of the Puerto Rican body through alternative routes, flows, and movements, asking us to read against the grain of this dominant discourse to create another possible Puerto Rico, a Puerto Rico whose body/bodies are not forcefully inscribed into the discursive formations of the island’s colonial legacy.
Members
Jack Brown—Department of Romance Studies, Spanish and Portuguese section
Isabel Padilla Carlo—Department of Performance and Media Arts
Daniel Rosa Hunter— Department of Romance Studies, Spanish and Portuguese section
Santiago Diago Lizarralde—Department of Comparative Literature
Ivelisse Álvarez Santiago—Department of Romance Studies, Spanish and Portuguese section
EXTRACTIVISM IN ITS LONGUE DURÉE: MATERIALS, BODIES, SPACES
As current scholarship on energy strives to think about futures "after oil" (Szeman and Petrocultures Research Group, 2016), the usual culprits remain: petroextractivism, wastelanding, and economies built around social and ecological abandonment zones. Even as conversations around cultures of energy change the object of study from one resource to another—from coal to oil, from oil to solar—how do we account for the underlying premises and ideologies that support the logic of extractivism and how these, in turn, are manifest in property regimes and land tenure, or in the racial regimes that undergird their administration? If it is extractivism, as a practice (Riofrancos, 2025), the object of historical analysis, and not just the "extractive economy," we shift the attention from studying specific resources to how objects (mineral or biological) became resources in the first place. To achieve this broader reading, we need what Mohamed Amer Meziane calls a "pluralization of chronologies" (Meziane, 2024). What kinds of histories do we uncover when we consider extractivism's long duree? What other narratives emerge when we look beyond the typical periodization that link the origins of extractivism to the transformation of fossil fuels into inexpensive and disposable sources of unlimited energy, or to the rise of fossil capitalism? Examining extraction as a practice highlights the politics, techniques, and beliefs that have underpinned various extraction practices worldwide—whether within imperial, colonial, or postcolonial states—to support a biopolitics of "resource-making."(Hetherington, 2020). In a similar way to Meziane, who does not attribute a single origin to colonial modernity, our focus on the long history of extractivism seeks to avoid ranking various experiences of modernity. Instead, we concentrate on practices that are considered life-sustaining.
As part of our interests in the spatial, technical, and infrastructural relationships between extractive practices and their histories, our reading list engages with recent works in the environmental humanities, STS, and with decolonial and postcolonial studies under the auspice of the energy humanities to account for a global understanding of extractivism's imbrications with the management of life. Following this scholarship (Szeman and Boyer, 2017; Pasqualetti, 2021; and Miller, 2021), our list explores the material and infrastructural forms and processes (Shafiee, 2018; Appel, 2019; and Wellum, 2023) that enabled various global capitalist projects consolidated around resource extraction (Mitchell, 2013;Bet-Shlimon, 2019; Andrews and Bowles, 2023; and Seow, 2023) while providing a critical perspective on what counts as resources and forms of extraction (Daggett, 2019; Cram, 2022; and Schields, 2024)."Extractivism" not only made contemporary capitalism possible—its condition of possibility—but also remains deeply intertwined with the racialized and gendered histories of colonialism, empire, and white supremacy that shaped capitalism and liberalism (Grove, 1995; Malm, 2016; Meziane, 2024).
Members
Alena Zhang—Department of Science and Technology Studies
Ehssan Haniff—Department of History of Architecture and Urban Development
Piergianna Mazzocca— Department of History of Architecture and Urban Development
Qianye Yu— Department of History of Architecture and Urban Development
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BORDERS OF MEMORY: THE POLITICS OF MIGRATION, DIASPORA, AND COLONIAL LEGACIES
Our contemporary moment, marked by environmental crises, political conflicts, and growing socio-economic inequalities, has seen an increase in the movement of peoples and populations, amidst a resurgence of right-wing, protectionist, anti-immigration, and nativist rhetoric. Diasporas of various cultures have historically formed across the globe, creating transnational and hybrid spaces that embody the complex intersections of migration, political struggles, and cultural transformations. This reading group asks: How can we understand the complex experiences of displaced communities—whether such migrations were voluntary or forced? How are issues of historical memory, land, power-place relations, and cultural translation expressed in both material and ideological forms? What can the study of diaspora—both as a theoretical concept and an empirical category—reveal about the ongoing impacts of colonialism and capitalism in shaping contemporary social imaginaries?
Building on diaspora studies scholar Ipek Demir’s call to view diaspora as both a modality of translation and decolonization, this group conceptualizes diasporas not as isolated phenomena, but as outcomes of historic relationships born out of imperial expansion and retraction, with migrants acting as translators and agents that both endure and respond to centers of power (Demir 2022). This theoretical framework offers critical insights into the meanings of citizenship, sovereignty, and authenticity, while addressing pressing issues such as ethno-nationalism, racism, and xenophobia.
Our reading list reflects the interdisciplinary interests of our members, whose expertise spans anthropology, art and architectural history, and political theory. In particular, the group will focus on the post/colonial histories of India and Hong Kong to examine how British colonial legacies continue to shape the cultural landscapes and identities of these regions and their diasporas. We begin with theoretical readings in cultural studies, sociology, and literature that examine diaspora as a concept (Hall 1990; Bhabha 1990; Chow 1993; Clifford 1994; Edwards 2003; Demir 2022), followed by works that problematize the concept’s productivity, grounded in specific diasporic experiences (Shih 2010; Chow 2014; Chan 2018).
The conversation will also engage with the concepts of borders and history. Theoretical readings and ethnographic studies on borders and borderlands offer ways to rethink notions of land, the nation-state, center-periphery relations, and subaltern decolonial possibilities (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2014; Popescu 2011; Sharma 2011; Misra 2011). Crucial learnings will come from indigenous political thought and decolonial theory (Temin 2023; Simpson 2014; Walsh 2007; Mamdani 2020). We will also examine how immigrant experiences are articulated spatially and visually, through works that explore the intersection of borders and their aesthetic expressions (Schimanski and Wolfe 2017; Schimanski and Nyman 2021; Moze and Spigel 2022). Finally, works on the production of history will critically address how knowledge and language production are sites of power (Benjamin 1968; Foucault 1982; de Certeau 1992; Rancière 1994), exploring questions central to the documentation and representation of post/colonial experiences (Chakrabarty 1992; Scott 2004; Trouillot 2015).
This reading group will foster a collaborative, cross-disciplinary examination of diaspora, borders, and history, contributing to a deeper understanding of the complex legacies of colonialism and their ongoing effects on migration, identity, and global political struggles.
Members
Sara Ather—Department of Architecture, History of Architecture and Urban Development
Alice Fung— Department of History of Art and Visual Studies
Jacqueline Liu—Department of Government
Chaoyu Mao—Department of Anthropology
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THRESHOLDS OF SOVEREIGNTY: PERFORATIONS IN THE FABRIC OF GLOBAL CAPITAL
Contemporary debates around sovereignty have moved beyond the formalist frameworks of state control and legal recognition to consider the multiple, layered terrains on which sovereignty is both asserted and undermined. From the enduring legacies of colonial economic structures to the contested geographies of infrastructure and global capital, sovereignty is increasingly understood as a dynamic process shaped by forces operating across scales. Economic systems, temporal regimes, and spatial infrastructures function not merely as neutral domains but as active sites of contention where questions of authority and autonomy are continually challenged and reconfigured.
In this context, a growing body of scholarship turns to theory, history, and ethnography to trace how global movements for social and economic justice, particularly those associated with alter-globalization, interact with localized sites of resistance. These encounters expose the tensions between global imaginaries and grounded political struggles, illuminating how communities negotiate authority, autonomy, and belonging in a world marked by uneven development and imperial residue. Moreover, South-South theorizing has also arisen to offer critical frameworks for understanding these dynamics, providing insights that transcend the binaries of center and periphery and that foreground knowledge production emerging from the Global South.
In interrogating and debating the ‘thresholds of sovereignty,’ this reading group aims to examine both the colonial and post-colonial periods as charged junctures in which local and trans-national actors engage in contestations of sovereignty. With a focus on the Global South, we aim to examine and debate the various meanings of sovereignty across economic systems, temporal boundaries, and spatial infrastructures. We are interested in understanding the logics, stakes, and implications of collective organizing and political upheaval that distorts, challenges, and re-signifies sovereignty in its many forms.
As a theoretical approach, we also aim to understand the workings of ‘global capital’ as it establishes normative frameworks for sovereignty and contestation. In our individual graduate studies, we have observed how political rupture and collective theorizing – particularly occurring in the Global South – has challenged and upended these systems. As we think about contestations of sovereignty, we therefore envision these as perforations in the fabric of global capital. This reading group is interested in examining these perforations, and collectively thinking about how we can further theorize and conceptualize these moments of fracture.
Our reading list draws from across disciplinary boundaries, challenging their very own thresholds. Reflective of our diverse specialties and collective interests, the selected texts examine the various layers in which sovereignty has been contested, with a focus on economic systems, temporality, space and infrastructure, alter-globalization, and local sites of tension. By examining the dialogic relationship between alter-globalization movements and local sites of tension in a South-South perspective, we can understand how sovereignty is rearticulated from below, offering alternative visions of autonomy and global solidarity that challenge dominant paradigms of power and governance.
Members
Camila Acosta— Department of History
Alexander van Biema—Africana Studies & Research Center
Carmine Couloute—Department of Government
Yakin Kinger—Department of Architecture, History of Architecture and Urban Development
Javier Sánchez Mora—Department of History
Jai Vipra—Department of Science & Technology Studies