Events

Explore some of my upcoming and past public events. Some events are based on my research, but others are related to my ongoing collaborations and broader interests.

My C.V. has a full list of events I’ve been part of. You can find it on my About page.

My presentation on the panel, “City as Classroom,” held in Yogyakarta, Indonesia as part of the 2024 AAS-in-Asia Conference, organized collaboratively by the Association for Asian Studies and the Universitas of Gadjah Mada.

Upcoming events

  • What Is (A) Narrative? Toward a Long-overdue Dialogue Between Literature and Linguistic Anthropology

    February 2026

    Seminar Presentation | “Literary Ethnography” (organized by Cheng-Chai Chiang) | American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference | Montreal, Canada

  • Un/bundling Race, Ethnicity, and Otherness in Global Singapore

    March 14, 2026

    Roundtable Discussion | Featuring Xinyu Guan, Vincent Pak, Tinesh Indrarajah, Jane Zhang, and Victor Zhuang | Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference | Vancouver, Canada

  • Creative Destruction and Reinventing “Identity Nodes” in Singapore’s Master Plan 2025: Reminiscing Backward, Fantasizing Forward

    March 15, 2026

    Panel | “Places Without History? Ambivalence and Paradoxes in Urban Asian Development Narratives” (co-organized with Dodom Kim) | Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference | Vancouver, Canada

Post-panel Q&A at the Asia as Action: Scaling Ethnography of the Everyday conference, 21–22 June 2019 in Beijing, China. Photo by Li Yuxuan.

Post-panel Q&A at the Asia as Action: Scaling Ethnography of the Everyday conference, 21–22 June 2019 in Beijing, China. Photo by Li Yuxuan.

Past events

  • Between Two Singapores: Settler Romances, (Un)critical AI Fabulations, and the Unanswerable Why

    November 22, 2025

    Conference paper Presentation | Session: “Unsettling Settler Romances” | 2025 American Studies Association Annual Meeting, San Juan, Puerto Rico

  • Desiring Ghosts

    Nov 20, 2025

    Roundtable | Featuring Amanda Brock, Annalisa Heppner, Jordi Rivera Prince, and Jonathan Rosa | 2025 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, Louisiana

  • What Is (a) Narrative? Toward a Long-overdue Dialogue Between Literature and Linguistic Anthropology

    November 14, 2025

    Invited Talk and Roundtable with Michael Lucey  | University of California Berkeley Departments of English, Anthropology, and Comparative Literature, and the Consortium on the Novel Working Group | Berkeley, California

  • In the Predator’s Shadow: On the Impossibility of Decolonizing Anthropology (and Why Critique Was Never Enough)

    Nov 3 – 8, 2025

    Conference paper presentation | Session: “Urgent Ethnography: Destabilizing Anthropological Spectatorship and Forging Global (Non-)Solidarities” (co-organized with Yukun Zeng) | World Anthropological Union Congress 2025, Antigua, Guatemala

  • 2025 Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture

    Oct 15 – 16, 2025

    Respondent | “Racial Expressions: Communicating and Contesting Colonial Inheritances”: Lecture by Jonathan Rosa, Stanford University | Department of Anthropology, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York

  • Evidence and the AI Interlocutor

    Sep 3 – 6, 2025

    Conference paper presentation | Session: “(Un-)Black-Boxing AI Agencies” | 2025 Society for the Social Studies of Science Annual Conference, Seattle, Washington

  • Ambivalent Images: ‘Multi-’ Singapore, Racial-Singaporeans, and Trouble at the Hyphen

    June 6, 2025

    Invited Lecture | Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture (​上智大学比較文化研究所)

  • Desiring Distinctions: Totalizing Images and Coercions of Community in Multiracial, Multilingual Singapore

    January 30, 2025

    Ronald and Janette Gatty Lecture | George McT. Kahin Center for Advanced Research on Southeast Asia, Cornell University | Listen to a recap on the Gatty Rewind Podcast

  • The Master’s Tools—And House—Were Never His

    Apr 25, 2025

    Research Paper Presentation | “Unsettling Images, Engaging Fictions” symposium | Co-organized with Suzie Telep | Co-sponsored by the Brown University Departments of Anthropology, English, and Literary Arts, Pembroke Center, Brown Arts Institute, and Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Department of Anthropology

  • Buried Singapore: Ghosts, Hallucinations, or Critical Fabulations in the AI?

    Oct 24, 2024

    Digital Humanities Salon | Brown University Center for Digital Scholarship

  • Beyond Babel: Insurgent Multilingualism and Decolonizing Public Space

    December 1, 2023

    Exhibition activation, language showcase, and screening | The Inaugural Brown Arts Institute IGNITE Series | Co-organized with Joseph Dupris, Foroogh Farhang, Meg Harvey, and Jordi Rivera Prince | Brown University

  • “Discuss Race Issues in the Right Way”: Totalizing Images and Partial Semiotic Facts in Singapore

    November 8–11, 2023

    Conference paper presentation | 122nd Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association | Toronto, Canada

  • How Does the State Ignore? The Contested Case of U.S. School Boards, from the Screen to the Meeting Hall

    May 19, 2023

    Webinar keynote | Co-presented with Ilana Gershon | Talking Politics 2023: Silences + Voices in Global Media | Sponsored by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, University of Chicago Center for the Study of Communication and Society and Linguistic Anthropology Lab, and University of Colorado Boulder Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP)

  • Singapore’s Multi-Scalar Fictions

    March 25, 2023

    Ethnographic fiction salon | American Ethnological Society, Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, and Council on Anthropology and Education 2023 Spring Conference | Princeton University

  • Becoming White In Singapore: Perspectives on a Raciolinguistic Shifter In Motion

    December 11, 2025

    Junior Scholar Keynote | 11th International Conference on Southeast Asia | Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Looking for more events? Download the latest version of my C.V.