Sustainable futures: ecologies, kinships, and communities in Southeast Asian Cinemas

Deadline: December 1, 2024.
Symposium date: 14 – 16 August 2025
Symposium venue: Chiang Mai University

The 12th Biennial Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference will take place at Chiang Mai University, on 14 – 16 August 2025. The focus of the conference is Sustainable Futures: ecologies, kinships and communities in Southeast Asian Cinemas. This theme will be addressed from a broad range of perspectives in order to encourage critical engagement with current debates in film theory and the environmental humanities, inviting papers that theorize the diverse film and media practices across Southeast Asia including new developments in artists’ moving image, video art, VR, and activist media.

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in ecological approaches to film and media studies including publications devoted to Southeast Asia (e.g. Chua, Davis and Taylor, 2021; Chulphongsathorn and Lovatt, 2022; Ryan and Telles, 2022). Seeking to build on this work, the conference invites papers that develop new approaches to questions of ecology and sustainability from a variety of perspectives including film production, exhibition, discussion and circulation. We are interested in papers that respond to questions such as: What can a specific focus on Southeast Asian film bring to existing debates within the fields of energy ethics, the blue humanities, posthumanism and human-nonhuman relations (including human-spirit) and/or animal studies? And what kinds of practices build and sustain communities, kinships and solidarities in the face of ongoing ecological and humanitarian crises brought about by extractivist capitalism, war and authoritarianism?

We welcome a range of methodological and theoretical approaches. Topics could include (but are not limited to):

• Sustainable practices in film production and archiving
• Materialism, extractivism, electronic waste
• Feminist, indigenous and decolonial theories of environmental histories
• Queer ecologies
• Animism and more-than-human relations in film aesthetics, genres and narratives
• Sustaining practices of kinship and communities through film production, exhibition, criticism and pedagogy
• Cinema and moving images in the context of ritual, religious and other supra-human engagements
• Migration, war, and human rights on screen
• Animal studies and film
• Energy ethics on screen
• Blue humanities, oceanic humanities
• Elemental media
• Useful cinema, non-theatrical cinema, industrial films, infrastructural cinema
• Activist film and video, social movements
• Film and the plantationocene

Abstract Submission Deadline: December 1, 2024.

Please use the online forms below to submit your paper or panel proposals. Paper and panel abstracts should not exceed 300 words. Panels should have at least three papers but not more than four papers, and each panel proposal must also be accompanied by the corresponding paper proposal for each paper on the panel.

Graduate students are invited to apply for an online workshop, which will be held via Zoom the day prior to the conference on August 13, 2025. Workshop participants will be divided into small groups of 3-4 students. Each group will work with a mentor, who will offer close feedback on their submissions and moderate the workshop. Everyone in the group will read each other’s work and offer constructive advice during the workshop, in the spirit of intellectual engagement and generosity. We welcome submissions of completed drafts or works-in-progress (future conference presentations or research publications).

Panel proposers: https://tinyurl.com/aseacc2025panels

Paper proposers: https://tinyurl.com/aseacc2025papers

Graduate workshop proposers: https://tinyurl.com/aseacc2025gsw

For conference inquiries, please email the abstracts committee: Leong Yew – NUS College lyew@nus.edu; Mariam Lam – University of California-Riverside mariam.lam@ucr.edu; Katrina Tan – University of the Philippines Los Baños katan@up.edu.ph and Sophia Siddique – Vassar College soharvey@vassar.edu.