The 6th SEASIA Biennial Conference, “Forging Southeast Asia’s Futures,” will be held on 8–10 July 2026 at the School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
“Forging Southeast Asia’s Futures” frames the 6th SEASIA Biennial Conference as an active inquiry into how diverse actors—states, communities, institutions, artists, educators, and technologists—shape the region’s trajectories amid shifting geopolitical, economic, environmental, and digital forces. The theme emphasizes agency: the everyday and strategic capacities through which people and organisations navigate, contest, and remake structures of power to produce multiple, competing pathways into the future.
The conference continues the regional legacy of SEASIA biennial conferences — a region‑based forum promoting Southeast Asian area studies hosted across Asia since the Consortium’s founding and inaugural meetings in 2013 and subsequent editions.
The conference organizers call for papers on the following sub‑themes
- Geopolitics, Governance, and the Agency of the State
- Economic Architectures and Pathways to Inclusive Growth
- Environmental Justice, Climate Change, and Ecological Agency
- The Digital Nexus: Technology, Media, and Cybercultures
- The Power of the Past: History, Memory, and Narrative Agency
- Aesthetics of Agency: Arts, Literatures, and Cultural Expression
- Mobility, Migration, and Transnational Communities
- Dynamics of Identity: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender (Social Stability/Equality)
- The Educational Nexus: Pedagogy, Power, and the Practice of Teaching Southeast Asia
Submission procedures will be announced in due course on the SEASIA 2026 conference portal.