Asia Symposium 2025: InterAsian Circulations abstracts and bios

Friday, April 11th
Center for British and Irish Studies, 5th floor
Norlin Library

Symposium Schedule

11:30am-12:15pm Meet and greet/reception

12:15pm Introductions and welcome

12:30-2pm Panel 1: Religious and Social Movements in Asia
In recent years, religious and social movements have been dynamic forces in Asian societies. This panel examines the contours of such movements and their politics, with attention to how they circulate within and beyond national borders.

2-2:15pm break

2:15-3:45pm Panel 2: Migration and Refugee Circulations in Asia
Scholars and policy analysts have traditionally thought of migration as occurring from Asia to Europe, Australia/New Zealand, or the United States. Yet in 2020, out of 111 million migrants from Asia, more than 50 percent (about 66 million people) migrated to other countries within Asia. Migration is also increasingly occurring within Asian countries. This panel examines migration from the perspective of Asian societies.

3:45-4pm break

4-5pm Keynote presentation - Ismail Alatas, NYU

Panel 1 Abstracts and Bios

The Rise of Social Housing in South Korea and Taiwan

Yi-Ling Chen, Associate Professor, School of Politics, Public Affairs, and International Studies, University of Wyoming

As developmental states, South Korea and Taiwan share significant historical and economic parallels. Both were former Japanese colonies and later maintained close ties with the United States following World War II. Their economies experienced rapid industrial growth in the 1960s, driven by export-oriented strategies. The late 1980s marked a turning point with democratization, reshaping governance structures and enabling bottom-up social movements to play a more active role in shaping housing policies. Political competition further compelled both governments to expand social policies. While neoliberalism has led to a decline in social rental housing across many Western nations, East Asian governments—despite adopting neoliberal ideologies at a later stage—have paradoxically expanded their social housing provisions since the 1990s. This paper explores the development of social housing in South Korea and Taiwan in the post-democratization era, focusing on the interplay between structural path dependencies and shifting relationships among the state, housing market, and society.

Yi-Ling Chen is an Associate Professor in the School of Politics, Public Affairs, and International Studies at the University of Wyoming, USA. Prior to joining the University of Wyoming, she taught for eight years at National Dong Hua University in Taiwan. She has been actively involved in Taiwan’s housing movement since theSnail Without Shellmovement in 1989. Her research focuses on neoliberalism, urban social movements, gender, housing, and urban development in Taiwan, with her publications primarily examining housing and urban transformation from political-economic and feminist perspectives. In 2019, she editedNeoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities, and Housing in Asia(The Contemporary City) with Palgrave Macmillan. Her recent research explores housing policies, policy mobility and diffusion, and financialization in East Asia, the United States, and the Netherlands. She was the Taiwan Chair at Ghent University in Belgium in 2020 and has held visiting professorships at the University of British Columbia, the University of Amsterdam, the National University of Singapore, Hong Kong Baptist University, the Seoul Institute, Seoul National University, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and Tübingen University in Germany.

Anti-compulsory Hijab Movement in Iran: The Complexities of Transnational Connections Amid Geopolitical Tensions

Neda Shaban, Geography, CU Boulder

This talk examines the influence of Iranian diaspora in the US on the anti-compulsory hijab movement in Iran amid tense US-Iran geopolitical relations. Activists in the diaspora have been influential in initiating and continuation of the anti-compulsory hijab movement in Iran since 2014. However, their relationship with activists in Iran became complicated when they aligned the movement with the US political agenda about Iran after a major shift in the US-Iran geopolitical relations in 2019. Women, Life, Freedom, themost recent uprising against compulsory hijab with the demand of bodily autonomy in 2022, has been the epitome of women's resistance against imposed hijab norms on their bodies. Again, while the role of diaspora in supporting the movement and spreading its message has been crucial, disagreements between activists in Iran and diaspora and among activists in diaspora about the movement leadership and its goals persist.

Neda Shaban is a geography PhD student at the . Her Master’s thesis focuses on the history and tactics of the anti-compulsory hijab movement in Iran. For her PhD research, she examines the influence of Iranian diaspora on Women, Life, Freedom movement as they take positions for or against economic sanctions against Iran.

The Bonhomie of Hindu Nationalism and White Nationalism: Facebook and the Profitability of Digital Hate Publics
Dheepa Sundaram, University of Denver
This talk considers the shared interests and growing alliances between Hindu nationalists and white nationalists, including white Christian nationalists. Focusing on a few specific events: the orchestrated celebration of the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35a ending Kashmir's autonomy in Times Square, the Indian independence day parade in Edison, NJ in 2022, and 2024 National Conservative conference, I show how Hindu nationalists and white/white christian nationalists have found common cause in authoritarian populism. Moreover, I also show how these movements have leveraged other ethnonationalist movements (e.g., Zionism) through social media platforms such as Facebook which has become a willing digital partner. I argue that investment in majoritarian grievance politics, rehistoricization, and anti-immigrant sentiment create the kind of engagement metrics that drive algorithm-based advertising, making such ideologies incredibly lucrative to social media platforms such as Facebook. Moreover, such a business model disincentivizes content moderation, undermines internet safety and dis/misinformation protocols, and creates an environment in which social media platforms are vulnerable to government intimidation as we have seen in India and is likely to happen in the US.
Dr. Dheepa Sundaram (she/her) is an assistant professor of Hindu Studies at the University
of Denver which sits on the stolen lands of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people. She studies hate politics, social media, and digital publics in South Asian contexts. Dr. Sundaram has presented and published on the formation of Hindu and Hindu nationalist virtual religious publics through online platforms and emerging technologies (e.g., social media, apps, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence). Her current monograph project, Globalizing Dharma: The Making of a Digital Hindu Brand, examines how commercial ritual websites fashion a digital canon for Hindu religious praxis, effectively branding religious identities and marketing caste-privileged religious norms as a default, cosmopolitan Hinduism that anchors the Hindu nationalist political project. She is also a contributor for Religion News Service on Hindu perspectives, a founding member of the US-based South Asia Scholar Activist Collective (SASAC), and a trainer for Sacred Writes (public scholarship training program for religion scholars).

Panel 2 Abstracts and Bios

Imperial Templates: How Indian Indenture to Mauritius and the West Indies Shaped Global Temporary Labor Migration

David-Cook Martin, Sociology, CU Boulder

This talk examines how the post-abolition movement of Indian indentured workers to Mauritius and the West Indies created legal and institutional templates for temporary labor migration that continue to shape global mobility patterns today. Drawing from a broader historical analysis of temporary labor migration schemes (TLMSs), I demonstrate how the British imperial context following the 1834 abolition of slavery produced contractual arrangements that reconciled the competing interests of capital and nation. While plantation owners sought cheap, docile labor to replace enslaved workers, imperial authorities needed to appease abolitionists while maintaining colonial productivity. The resulting indenture system—with its time-limited contracts, restricted rights, and state-sanctioned enforcement mechanisms—became a versatile model that spread globally and evolved across different political-economic orders. By tracing how these early employer-initiated schemes in British colonies established patterns later adopted in state-managed programs worldwide, this presentation reveals the historical continuities between 19th-century Indian Ocean indentured migration and contemporary temporary worker programs across Asia and beyond. This historical perspective helps us understand why temporary migration has become "the new normal" even in traditional immigration countries, challenging conventional migration paradigms centered on permanent settlement and integration.

David Cook-Martín is Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His work as a political sociologist focuses on understanding migration, labor, race, ethnicity, law, and citizenship in an international field of power. Geographically, his work has focused on the Americas, but also on Southern Europe. Most recently, his project on temporary labor migration schemes examines cases in Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates (subject of a book under contract with Oxford University Press). David’s award winning books include Culling the Masses (Harvard 20140, coauthored with David FitzGerald (received the American Sociological Association’s and the 2017 Midwest Sociological Society’s Distinguished Book Award, among other awards), and The Scramble for Citizens (Stanford 2012) received the (International Migration Section, ASA). See for additional information. Before moving to CU Boulder, David served as professor of sociology and Program Head of New York University Abu Dhabi’s a faculty member in the sociology department at Grinnell College and as that institution’s Assistant Vice President for Global Education and director of the Institute for Global Engagement. David has been a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council, is a former Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Latin American Sociology (UCLA), and a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow (UC Irvine).

Migration, Climate Change, and Resource Extraction in Papua New Guinea

Jerry Jacka, Anthropology, CU Boulder

In this presentation, I examine the impacts of resource extraction on customary migration patterns related to food insecurity in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. El Niños are common occurrences in the western Pacific and cause long term droughts in the region. Extreme El Niños happen every generation or so and also bring several nights of frosts to the highland regions which destroy traditional food crops. As a result, migration from higher altitude to lower altitude areas has a long history. These customary migration patterns have, however, been transformed by mining extraction in the region due to violent conflicts over land rights and resource sovereignty.

Jerry Jacka is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology. His work focuses on the political ecology of resource extraction examining the effects of mining on humans and their environments in Papua New Guinea and Colorado. As well, he studies the relationships between climate change and food insecurity.

Factory, Facebook, Home: The multiplying worlds of Rohingya women’s work

Shae Frydenlund, Asian Studies, CU Boulder

For many refugees, non-normative forms of work supplement meagre wages or replace formal wages entirely. This includes online sales work, app-connected work, and digital labor on multiple online platforms, from Uber to Instagram. In the Burmese Rohingya diaspora, Facebook Marketplace is especially significant as a source of income for many poor and working-class women who sell snacks, headscarves, makeup, and beauty services. Yet surprisingly, or unsurprisingly perhaps, the meteoric rise of flexible online sales work has not supplanted factory employment, unpaid toil, and social reproduction work as a primary world of work for Rohingya women. Instead, many take up additional “shifts” online to supplement meagre wages and fill gaps in household income. Put another way, Rohingya women’s worlds of work have instead multiplied as digital platforms and technologies capture their unpaid labor. This paper contends with the changing political economy of refugee labor before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. I also consider shifting regimes of exploitation – both in the digital and manufacturing worlds – alongside broader questions about the long-term impacts of the pandemic as the gulf between privileged work-from-home labor and unfree, precarious labor widens.

Shae Frydenlund is a human geographer who studies capitalist development from the perspective of displaced people. Funded by the National Science Foundation and Social Science Research Council, she is especially interested in how displaced women's labor underpins capitalism in Southeast Asia and the United States.Shae's current NSF research project examines racial capitalism in the United States food system by comparing the experiences of Burmese refugee meatpacking workers, indigenous migrant farm workers, and grocery store workers. Shae's newest project is a community-based study of the relationship between sustainable energy development and indigenous dispossessionin Indonesia. Her research is published inGeopolitics,Political Geography,andJournal ofCultural Geography,among others.Sheearned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Geography from the , and a B.A. in Geography from Colgate University.

Keynote Abstract and Bio

Sea of Friends: Wilāya as a Moral Framework of InterAsian Circulation

Ismail Fajrie Alatas, New York University

The past three decades have witnessed increasing interest among anthropologists and historians in writing about and theorizing transnational mobility, the rapid circulation of people and objects, and cosmopolitan cultural forms, along with the methodological shift from single- to multi-sited field/archival work. These shifts have sparked debates over the politics of global and trans-regional perspectives and their connections to imperial or neoliberal frameworks. Yet, global and trans-regional perspectives remain diverse, encompassing visions of connectivity and circulation that are radically different from the imperial or neoliberal rhetorics and teleology of globalization. Various historical actors have themselves theorized global or trans-regional connectivity and circulation through different frameworks. One such example is the Bā ʿAlawī Sufis from South Arabia, whose mobility across the Indian Ocean facilitated enduring networks of friendship that connect different localities. Analyzing their textual corpus, this talk uncovers the moral framework of wilāya, a concept encapsulating friendship, guardianship, and territoriality that offers visions of a trans-regional geography shaped by forms of protection, care, hospitality, and grace. While wilāya is an ideological concept that has shaped InterAsian circulation beyond political or economic imperatives, thinking with it opens up an analytic perspective on circulation that brings ethics, affect, forms of non-economic exchange, and cosmology into a unified interpretive frame.

Ismail Fajrie Alatas is associate professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, and History at New York University, and a fellow of The Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. He holds Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of What is Religious Authority? Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia (Princeton, 2021) along with many articles, the latest of which – “Voicing God’s presence: Qurʾānic recitation, Sufi ontologies, and the theatro-graphic experience” – appeared in Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory (2024). He is currently working on a new book project that explores the relationship between religion, spatiality, and geography by looking at a transoceanic moral geography that links Southeast Asia to South Arabia.