2025 AAA Annual Meeting Presentations

Big plans. URA Singapore City Gallery, July 2025.

I'm part of three sessions during the upcoming AAA Annual Meeting in New Orleans this November, ranging from a conversation on curiosity (in honor of the late Nelson Graburn) to a panel on the sensory city in Southeast Asia. Details below!

Thursday 11/20 2:30-4:00 pm
Discussant for the session "Rethinking Rural China: Habitation, Negotiation, and Anticipation."

Friday 11/21 12;45-2:15 pm
I'll be presenting a new paper titled "A Pastoral Present for the Urban Future: Land Reclamation, Domestic Architecture, and the Design of an Ideal City in Asia." In this essay, I analyze two art works, Ordos 100 by Ai Weiwei and Shifting Sands by Sim Chi Yin, to discuss how discourses of the ideal city enfold imaginations of a pastoral present within designs for an urban future.
Part of the session: "The Sensory City: Feeling and Futurity in Urban Southeast Asia" 

Saturday 11/22 10:15-11:45
Roundtable: "Being Curious: The Art of the Question"
A conversation inspired by Nelson Graburn (1936-2025)
This roundtable seeks to foster a space and time for thinking with and working through the politics, poetics, and potentials of curiosity in our contemporary moment. At a time when the very questions we ask, let alone the answers we hold true, are perceived by some as dangerous or requiring surveillance, what does it take to continue to insist on curiosity as a fundamental right?