Friday, October 2, 2009

Viral Ports, Virtual Currents: Interconnections between Media, the Arts and the Everyday in Southeast Asia and its Diasporas


FRIDAY and SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2-3, 2009
CHASS INTERDISCIPLINARY BUILDING SYMPOSIUM ROOM 1113
Schedule subject to change

Panel One, 2:30 PM

  • Ashley Carruthers, Lecturer, Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University
    Maria Tran, co-founder, Vietlish!, Youth Digital Cultures, Information & Cultural Exchange (ICE)
    Vietlish! New Media of the Vietnamese Diaspora
  • Stephanie Rabia, Instructor, Communications, LaSalle College of Antipolo, Philippines
    The Igorot in the World Wide Web: Exploring the Igorot Ethnic Identity Through the Communicative Act of Blogging
  • Chuong-Dai Vo, PhD candidate, Literature, UC San Diego
    The Image as Truth: History-Making and Disorientation in Hong-An Truong’s
    Adaptation Fever

DISCUSSANT: Toby Miller, Professor, Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside

Panel Two, 4 PM

  • Lily Ann Bolo Villaraza, PhD candidate, History, Northern Illinois University
    Power Plays: The Seditious Sarsuwela genre and the Sedition Act of 1901
  • Angela A. Mascarenas, PhD candidate, Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago
    Performing Cultural Disruptions: audience reception and the performance of collective memory in Noel Alumit’s Mr. & Mrs. LaQuesta Go Dancing.
  • Ruth Pe Palileo, PhD candidate, Drama and Performance, Trinity College, Ireland
    Performing an Aesthetics of Excess versus an Aesthetics of Poverty in the Philippines

DISCUSSANT: Christine Balance, Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies, UC Irvine

OPENING RECEPTION, 630 PM
CHASS INTERDISCIPLINARY COURTYARD

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2009

Panel Three, 9 AM

  • Stephanie Santos, PhD candidate, Women’s Studies, UC Los Angeles
    “Home away from home”: Filipino transnational communities of sentiment

    Thea Quiray Tagle, PhD candidate, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego
    Queer Zombies and Electric Dreams: Spectacle, Discipline, and Sexuality in the Philippines and United States

DISCUSSANT: Robert G. Diaz, Assistant Professor, English, Wayne State University

KEYNOTE ADDRESS, 10:30 AM

  • Rolando Tolentino, Professor, College of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines, Diliman

LUNCH

Panel Four, 12:30 PM

  • Vivian Wong, PhD candidate, Information Studies, UC Los Angeles
    Documenting “home” in the diaspora: Memory, records, and identities in the archival imaginary
  • Emily Hue, PhD candidate, American Studies, New York University
    Configuring Burmese Diaspora through San Minn’s Attraction: Burmese Visual Art in Exile on the Internet
  • Melissa Wall, Associate Professor, Journalism, California State University, Northridge
    Treepon Kirdnak, Instructor, Journalism, Bangkok University
    Siam Snapped: Uploading Thai Muslims onto Flickr

DISCUSSANT: Tamara Ho, Assistant Professor, Women’s Studies/SEATRiP, UC Riverside

Panel Five, 1:45 PM

  • Edwin Christian Jurriens, Lecturer, Indonesian Studies, University of New South Wales
    Critique, compliance and community: Indonesian video art across generations
  • Xavier Hernandez, MA candidate, Asian American Studies, San Francisco State University
    Whose Face, Space, and Tube?: An Analysis of How Pilipino Cultural Night Performers Imagine Themselves and their Virtual Audience”
  • Sudarat Musikawong, Assistant Professor, Sociology, Siena College, NY
    Representing Thai Labor Migrations: Immigrant Satellite Television
DISCUSSANT: Mariam Lam, Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature/SEATRiP, UC Riverside

PRESENTERS

Ashley Carruthers’ research to date has focused on the experiences and identities of members of the Vietnamese diaspora. He carried out his Ph.D. research in Western Sydney and Saigon, looking at how overseas Vietnamese people's relationships with Vietnam were changing from an exilic to a more transnational framework in the post-reform, post Cold War era. His work will soon appear in book form under the tentative title Beyond Diaspora: The Extensions of Vietnamese Social Space. A recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship in the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, he used that time to work on Vietnamese migration and culture in the region, resulting in publications on the different ways Indochinese food and consumer goods are commodified and exoticised in Japan and Singapore. His future research interests include work on new waves of migration from Vietnam to East Asia, including the movement of women from the Mekong Delta to Taiwan as brides.

After graduating from UC Irvine with a BA in Criminology, Law, & Society, Xavier Hernandez moved on to San Francisco State University as an MA candidate in the Department of Asian American Studies. He currently teaches at Burton High School in San Francisco as part of Pin@y Educational Partnerships (PEP), a program housed in the SFSU College of Ethnic Studies which utilizes its students to teach critical Ethnic Studies curricula at all educational levels within the San Francisco Unified School District. Xavier has participated in Pilipino Cultural Nights (PCN's) over the course of nine years as part of Pilipinos Sharing Smiles Together at Troy High School (1999-2003) and Kababayan at UC Irvine (2003-2008). In addition to performing in these productions as a dancer, singer, and actor, he has also contributed to PCN as a choreographer, writer, director, and executive producer.In the future, Xavier hopes to continue academic research regarding the psychology of performance and how it is influenced by new technologies. His interests in performance genres include the aforementioned PCN (and other forms of "cultural" production), hip hop, and professional wrestling.

Chuong-Dai Vo is a Ph.D candidate in Department of Literature at University of California, San Diego. She is finishing her dissertation on the relationship between nationalist historiography and the excavation and imagining of alternative histories, as seen in Vietnamese and diasporic literature, films, and visual culture.

Edwin Christian Jurriëns is Lecturer in Indonesian Studies at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, the University of New South Wales, Canberra. He is author of From Monologue to Dialogue: Radio and Reform in Indonesia (KITLV Press, forthcoming) and Cultural Travel and Migrancy: The Artistic Representation of Globalization in the Electronic Media of West Java (KITLV Press, 2004). He is also co-editor of Cosmopatriots: On Distant Belongings and Close Encounters (Rodopi, 2007). His current research interests are community media, video art, television parody and radio journalism.

Treepon Kirdnak is a journalism instructor at Bangkok University in Thailand where he teaches broadcast journalism and studies media representations of Muslims in the deep south of Thailand. He received his Master of Arts degree from California State University, Northridge.

Angela Mascarenas is currently a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Her research interests pertain to race, ethnicity, immigration and social movements. She is a co-founder of 20-year old Pintig, the only professional Filipino-American theatre group in the Midwest. She also co-founded CIRCA, a youth-theatre and community arts training organization as well AFIRE, an alliance working for immigrant rights and empowerment in the U.S.

Sudarat Musikawong is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Siena College. Musikawong has published work on independent Thai film/video, memory and Thai state violence, and is currently working on her book manuscript Violent Forgetting focused on visual artistic and cinematic memories of 1970s Thai state violence. Her new research explores the trafficking of Thai labor in the United States and issues of representing a transnational sense of Thai diasporas in satellite televison.

Ruth Pe Palileo is a PhD candidate at the Samuel Beckett Centre School of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. In addition to being a scholar, Ruth remains active in theater arts. Ruth will be directing David Mamet's The Shawl for Las Vegas Little Theatre in October 2009. Her recent directing credits include Midsummer Night’s Dream for Insurgo Theatre Movement, Las Vegas (2008), and an adaptation of The Golden Apple for Focus: Ireland (2006). She also wrote and produced the film short The Good Deed for Iclosada Films, Las Vegas (2004), which was shortlisted for the Cinemalaya Film Awards, Philippines. Ruth has also written several plays, most recently High Stakes for Pintig Cultural Group (Chicago) and Jeremiah and Three Ring Circus for Painted Filly Theatre (Dublin). She is a Co-Founder and former Artistic Director for Painted Filly Theatre. Ruth's writing has been published in various anthologies including Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing from New Rivers Press, Minnesota; College Green, Ireland; Ani 32: The Global Pinoy, Philippines and Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves from Deep Bowl Press, Illinois.

Stephanie Luanne Rabia is instructor of Communications at LaSalle College of Antipolo, Philippines. She recently received her Master of Arts in Speech Communication at the University of the Philippines, Diliman and participated as actor and production manager with Dulaang UP Baguio. Her concentrations in the area of communications include Internet-mediated communication, culture and communication, voice and diction, events planning & organization, and group communication.

Stephanie Santos is a PhD student at UCLA's Department of Women's Studies. Her research interests center around transnational women of color feminisms and the racialized and gendered foundations of globalization in Southeast Asia.

Thea Quiray Tagle is a fourth year PhD student in the Ethnic Studies department at the University of California, San Diego. She recently completed her MA thesis, titled “Domestic Disturbances: Genealogies of Discipline and Desire betweenthe United States and the Philippines,” one chapter of which she will be presenting in summary at this conference. Some of Thea’s current research interests are Filipino/American cultural production, domesticity and food practices, and women of color social movements. She thinks everyone should listen to more OPM (Original Pilipino Music) and get off YouTube, already!
Emily Hue's research interests include comparative ethnic studies, diaspora studies, transnational feminisms, Asian American women's cultural production. She has previously been involved in the Asian American Writers' Workshop, a non-profit in NYC, and worked in the academic publishing industry before joining theAmerican Studies Ph.D. program in the fall of 2008.

Rolando B. Tolentino is an associate professor in the Department of Film and Audiovisual Communication and dean of the College of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines, Diliman. He is author of National/Transnational: Subject Formation and Media in and on the Philippines (2001), and has edited Geopolitics of the Visible: Essays on Philippine Film Cultures (2000). He is a member of the Congress of Teachers and Educators for Nationalism and Democracy (CONTEND-UP) and Manunuri ng Pelikulang Filipino (Filipino Film Critics’ Group). UP Creative Writing Center, Paaralang Teresa Magbanua, National Research Council of the Philippines , and Oratura (portable performance group). He is also a virtual columnist for Bulatlat.com and Pinoyweekly.org.

Maria Tran is an Australian-born Vietnamese with a passion for youth activism through digital media. After completing a Bachelor of Psychology from University of Western Sydney, she is now an emerging film maker, having completed a multicultural film grant for “A Little Dream” and YFlickz People’s Choice Awards The Elevator. She is also film writer/ director of the award-winning short film Happy Dent, martial arts actress for ABC/TV Kung Fu series Downtown Rumble, and feature film Maximum Choppage: Round 2. Currently she is working at community arts organisation, Information & Cultural Exchange (ICE) as a Youth Digital Cultures Project Coordinator and a digital storytelling workshop facilitator, working directly with Western Sydney’s young people from culturally diverse backgrounds tell their stories in their own way. Her current projects include Vietnamese Storycubes; an intergenerational project, Vietnamese Stories Digital Storytelling Project & Vietlish TV! as a means to reconnect with Vietnamese people world wide and through the web.

Lily Ann Bolo Villaraza is a doctoral candidate in the department of history at Northern Illinois University. Lily Ann’s broader research interests revolve around the use of cultural production to articulate and negotiate ideas of cultural, ethnic and national identity in the ever-evolving global diaspora. Her proposed dissertation topic will analyze the articulation of nationalism through theater at the turn of the 20th century in the Philippines. In addition to her academic work, Lily Ann continues to be committed to her community back home, serving as a mentor and advisor for the Philippine American Youth Organization in San Diego, California and recent coordinator for FilAmFest, the largest Filipino American Culture and Arts fair in San Diego County.

Melissa Wall received her doctral degree from the University of Washington. She teaches and researches the intersections of social media and journalism within international contexts at California State University - Northridge where she is associate professor and runs the graduate program. A former journalist, she has also reported for Seattle’s homeless newspaper, advised a Los Angeles student-radio project affiliated with Pacifica, taught journalism in Ethiopia, and studied township publications in Zimbabwe. Her research, focusing on international news as well as new media, has been published in journals such as Media, Culture & Society, Journalism, New Media & Society, Gazette, and Journalism Studies.

Vivian Wong is a doctoral student at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies in the Department of Information Studies. Her research interests include the documentation, collection, preservation, and dissemination of historical and cultural records in Asian American communities and archival formations in the Asian diaspora. She was awarded the American Library Association Spectrum Doctoral Fellowship in 2007. She is also an award-winning filmmaker who received her MFA in Directing from the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. Her most recent film is the short documentary Homecoming (2005) about her grandmother from Malaysia. Her work has screened internationally in film festivals, academic conferences, and on PBS. She has taught courses in community media, video ethnography, and documentary filmmaking at the UCLA Asian American Studies Department. She originally hails from the East Coast, growing up in Maryland and graduating from college in Pennsylvania.

DISCUSSANTS

Christine Balance is assistant professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She recently completed a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Riverside’s Department of Music. She also was awarded a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Pre-Doctoral Fellowship with the American Cultures Program at Vassar College in 2006. She received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University. She is one-third of the pop culture blog OH! INDUSTRY (www.ohindustry.com) with Karen Tongson and Alexandra Vazquez and one-ninth of the power pop band, The Jack Lords (www.thejacklords.com). Christine’s research interests include Filipino/Filipino American Performance and Culture; Asian Americans and War; Race, Gender, and American Popular Culture. Her work has appeared in Theatre Journal, a special issue on “Violence” for the Journal of Asian American Studies, Women and Performance, TEN magazine, and Stage Presence: Conversations with Filipino American Performance Artists (edited by Theo Gonzalves, 2007). She is currently working on a book project that looks at popular music in Filipino America.

Robert G. Diaz is currently an Andrew Mellon Sawyer Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of English at UCLA. Before accepting this fellowship, Robert taught at Wayne State University’s English Department as an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies. He has also been awarded an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Southern California in Comparative Ethnic Studies. Together with Joshua Chambers-Letson, Robert guest-edited a special issue of Women and Performance for Routledge Press on “Performing Reparation: Practice, Methodology, Process.” His current book project, Reparative Acts: Redress and the Politics of Queer Undoing, explores how queer minorities in the diaspora expand political and economic reparations beyond monetary forms of redress.

Tamara Ho joined the Women's Studies Department at the University of California, Riverside in 2006. Her research and teaching focuses on the gendering of human rights, transnationalism, immigration, and intersections of race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Her areas of specialization include Asian American literature, Chicana/o literature, LGBT studies, Anglophone postcolonial studies, Southeast Asian diaspora, and transnational feminist politics. She is currently developing a book manuscript from her dissertation titled "Through a Burmese Looking-Glass: Transgression, Displacement, and Transnational Women's Identities." This project examines gendered displacement, human rights, and the politics of intimacy in the writing of Aung San Suu Kyi, George Orwell, Ma Ma Lay, Wendy Law-Yone, and Ma Thida. Her work has appeared in The Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States (edited by Deena J. González and Suzanne Oboler, 2005), A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature (edited by Sau-ling Wong and Stephen Sumida, 2001), Word Matters: Conversations with Asian American Authors (edited by King-Kok Cheung, 2000) and Amerasia Journal.

Mariam B. Lam is assistant professor of literature, media & cultural studies, and Southeast Asian studies at the UC Riverside. She specializes in Vietnamese, Southeast Asian and Asian American literature, film, popular culture, gender and sexuality, translation, tourism and community politics. She is currently finishing her book project, “Viet Nam: Trauma, Memory, and Cultural Politics,” which analyzes cultural production and community politics within and across Vietnam, France, and the United States. She is also co-editor of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies and both editions of Vietnamese Americans: Lessons in American History. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Southeast Asian Language Teaching, Amerasia Journal, and Independent Cinemas in Contemporary Southeast Asia (edited by May Igawanaj and Benjamin McKay, 2010) to name a few. She received a number of awards and honors for her work. Some of her more recent ones include the Omnibus Academic Senate Research Grant (2004) and the Rockefeller Research Fellow (2002). Mariam is also organizing the sixth International Southeast Asian Cinema Conference and Film Festival to be held in Hồ Chí Minh City, Việt Nam, July 1-4, 2010. Mariam also works with community organizations such as the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association, Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, Global Village Foundation, Riverside Asian American Community Association and the Southeast Asian Archives at UC Irvine.

Toby Miller studies the media, sport, labor, gender, race, citizenship, politics, and cultural policy via political economy, textual analysis, archival research, and ethnography. A professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside, he is also Editor of Television & New Media and Editor and Co-Editor of book series Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Lang) and Sport and Culture (Minnesota), he was also Chair of the International Communication Association Philosophy of Communication Division, Editor of Journal of Sport & Social Issues, and Co-Editor of Social Text, the Blackwell Cultural Theory Resource Centre, and the book series Film Guidebooks (Routledge) and Cultural Politics (Minnesota). He has recently become the co-editor of Social Identities. After working in broadcasting, banking, and civil service, Toby Miller became an academic in the late 1980s, when cultural studies was starting its boom, and was able to parlay a combination of his work experience, theoretical interests, and political commitments into a new career, since which time he has taught media and cultural studies across the humanities and social sciences at the following schools: University of New South Wales, Griffith University, Murdoch University, and NYU. At UCR, he has the intention of sustaining and developing a dynamic interdisciplinary research environment in media and culture.

ORGANIZERS

Husni Abu Bakar, Comparative Literature
Husni received his M.A. in Linguistics and Cognitive Science from University of Delaware and is currently a graduate student in the Department of Comparative Literature and the program in Southeast Asia: Text, Ritual and Performance at the University of California, Riverside. His research interests include various topics in classical Malay literature, Buddhist literature, literary translation, sociolinguistics and religious studies.

Paul Michael (Mike) Leonardo Atienza, Southeast Asia: Text, Ritual and Performance
Mike is completing his Master of Arts degree in the Southeast Asia: Text, Ritual and Performance program. His current research deals with Internet communities and social networking web sites, genders and sexualities, and Philippine diasporas. He is also completing a performance piece titled Confession: a drag offering that explores circulating media images of Filipin@ women and his personal memories of growing up queer. He is a vocalist for various on and off campus groups including Orkes Pantai Barat, UCR’s keroncong ensemble. In his spare time, he works as a fulltime undergraduate academic adviser for the Departments of Media and Cultural Studies and Women’s Studies.

Leonido (Jun) Gines, Anthropology
Jun is a Ph.D. student in cultural anthropology. His interest is in looking at how the ‘vernacular' is being reconstructed in Philippine architectural practice and how it is becoming part of national consciousness of Filipinos to help articulate ideology, identity, memory and spatiality or locationality. Drawing from his experience as an architect and his participation in museum projects, he looks at the Tagalog hegemonic construction, production and reproduction of spatiality. Within this domain, he asks how people move within, respond to and configure into the complexities of urbanized dwelling and living in the Philippines.

Russell (Russ) Skelchy, Ethnomusicology
Russ is a PhD student in Ethnomusicology and an MA student in the program for Southeast Asia: Text, Ritual and Performance (SEATRiP). His research interests include cultural hybridity, mixed-race/multiethnic identity, nationalism, networking technologies and the musics of Indonesia and Malaysia. His research focuses on keroncong, a music originating in Portuguese folk music that also blends elements of Indonesian and Malaysian musics. Russ recently founded Orkes Pantai Barat, a keroncong ensemble at UC Riverside and plays in the school’s Javanese gamelan ensemble. He also played in the Filipino rondalla ensemble. He’s also been active in the San Francisco Bay Area music scene, playing in various experimental/rock bands.

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