2017 Southeast Asian American Studies Conference

The 2017 Southeast Asian American Studies conference will be held July 27-29, 2017, at the University of Massachusetts Lowell in Lowell, MA. The theme for this year's conference is "Community Engagement, Research, and Policy in Action." Their call for proposals is open until February 1st!

The 2017 conference will highlight Southeast Asian American communities in New England. Lowell, Massachusetts, is home to the second largest Cambodian American population in the United States, as well as Vietnamese, Lao, Burmese, and Bhutanese Americans. Nearby Dorchester, MA, and Providence, RI, are home to significant Vietnamese and Lao American populations, respectively.

This conference also seeks to build bridges across disciplines (humanities, social sciences, and sciences), and across/among scholars, artists, policymakers, and community members. What are the range of approaches to Southeast Asian American Studies? How might we foster communication and collaboration between fields and disciplines? What interdisciplinary approaches have been fruitful? What are some challenges to working across disciplinary boundaries? Given the opportunities and challenges of community-engaged research, what role can scholarship play in enabling social change for diverse SEAA communities? How can engagement with SEAA communities enrich and inform scholarship, and vice versa? We seek papers and panels from the humanities, social sciences, and sciences -- particularly in the areas of education, health, and public policy -- as well as from community organizations.

Since the first Southeast Asians in the Diaspora conference in 2005 at UC Riverside – which began as a conversation between scholars in Vietnam Studies, Southeast Asian area studies, and Asian American studies – the field has expanded into an established field concerned with a range of issues in Southeast Asian America. This conference seeks to build on this growth of Southeast Asian American Studies and continue to explore ways to work with communities, advocate for change, and formulate policy initiatives.