Andrew M. Carruthers (Ph.D., Yale University) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Faculty Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center, Graduate Member of the Lauder Institute of International Studies at The Wharton School, Affiliated Faculty at the Perry World House, and Faculty Advisor to the graduate student-led Southeast Asia Working Group (SEAG). In the Department of Anthropology, he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in linguistic anthropology, semiotics, and Southeast Asian Studies, alongside topical modules focused on issues of migration and globalization. Trained in the ethnography of Island Southeast Asia, his research centers on the relation between language, migration, and value to better understand how Malay-speaking migrants jointly navigate islands of possibility in an archipelagic world. His research has appeared in wide-ranging academic journals and public-facing outlets alike, including the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Public Culture, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Trends in Southeast Asia, SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, ISEAS Perspective, ISEAS Commentary, and TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Before arriving at the University of Pennsylvania, he was Visiting and Associate Fellow in the Indonesian and Malaysian Studies Programmes at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Max Weber Foundation Working Group in “Borders, Mobility, and New Infrastructures” at the National University of Singapore, where he remains affiliated as an International Research Member.

Nursyazwani is a PhD student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in refugees’ everyday struggles to rethink new kinds of politics emerging from the global south. Her research interests revolve around questions of citizenship, violence, politics, refugee political subjectivity, and migration. She has been working with refugees, particularly Rohingya refugees, in Malaysia since 2017, and more recently, with resettled Rohingya refugees in Chicago. She received her M.Soc.Sci. from the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore, where her research focused on the co-construction of refugee legibility among Rohingya in Malaysia. Previously, she was a Research Associate at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. She is also actively involved with Advocates for Refugees-Singapore.

Praveen Vijayakumar is a PhD candidate in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his MA at McGill University (Religious Studies) and his BA at the National University of Singapore (South Asia Studies). His earlier work, which was ethnographic, was focused on the Tamil transgender community in contemporary Singapore and Malaysia and addressed minority positionalities. Praveen shifted his focus to the history of the performing arts of south India for his MA, which was a study of printed works on music and dance authored by non-Hindus and non-caste elites in twentieth-century south India. He continues to work on the history of the performing arts of south India. Covering the late eighteenth to twentieth centuries, his current project examines musical patronage activities and Tamil print culture, and identifies the discourses around religion and performing arts as a crucial site that enabled caste- and culture-making processes in modern south India. Praveen also conducts workshops with the Penn Museum. His workshop is titled "Stories from the Tamil Diaspora" and traces a (his) Singaporean Tamil family’s history back to Tamil Nadu, India, in the early 20th century. Praveen shares experiences of British colonialism, Tamil performing arts practices, and Singapore’s transition from colony to an independent, multicultural, and global nation in his workshop. Through storytelling, the workshop invites participants to personally engage with global cultures, re-imagine past histories, and discuss positive futures.

Rebecca Winkler is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and a visiting scholar at Chiang Mai University, Thailand.

Rebecca’s socio-cultural anthropology research is situated along the Thai/Myanmar border region where she collaborates with Karen indigenous communities, NGO leaders, conservation biologists, and animal welfare scientists addressing questions of care, reciprocity, and political and environmental sovereignty expanding beyond species boundaries.

In Philadelphia, Rebecca collaborates with local Karen leaders on issues of accessibility within the city infrastructure, teaches a weekly ESOL class with Karen elders, and collaborates on a community garden project using experimental ethnographic methods to collaboratively explore questions of belonging and memory.

Rebecca has a background in biology and previously worked in the conservation/animal welfare field.