In Consort with Dams: Ecologies of Hydropower, Data, and Cinema in the Mekong

Ma Shaoling's talk draws from an ongoing collaborative project with a systems engineer to map out mainland Southeast Asia’s energy grid, and how cinema such as a 1964 educational film co-produced by the Shell Film Unit and United Nation; the Isan Film Collective’s experimental historical docudrama Tongpan (1977); Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mekong Hotel (2014 feature film); and Pham Ngoc Lân’s short The Unseen River (2020) constitute their own ecology of audiovisual data that can be added onto and complicate the Mekong’s multi-scalar human-natural-and-technological systems.

 

Ma Shaoling is an interdisciplinary scholar and critical theorist of global Chinese literature, cultural history, and media. At the broadest level, she is drawn to historical periods when geopolitical, socio-economic, and technological developments appear to provide external vantage points from which to navigate the landscape of cultural production, while, in fact, being resolutely embedded within it. Her teaching and research interests include critical theory and late nineteenth-century to contemporary Chinese and Southeast Asian studies. Her first book, The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861–1906 (Duke UP, 2021), asks what media studies can gain conceptually from the last few decades of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1912), and what this politicized and semicolonial phase of Chinese history looks like when viewed through the new and mostly foreign communicative technologies of its time—such as telegraphy, telephony, phonography, and photography. The Stone and the Wireless argues that when Chinese intellectuals, writers, and revolutionaries wrote and illustrated their encounters with these devices, they inadvertently challenged existing notions of politics, tradition, and science, thereby reconfiguring new sites of ideological struggle. Ma is currently working on her second book, tentatively titled Asia in Loops, a cultural history and critical theorization of how computational techniques aiding East and Southeast Asian capitalist accumulation feed on the region’s larger geopolitical tensions to produce seemingly self-referential and self-regenerating loops to which culture and criticism risk capitulating. Topics for her other concurrent projects include intersections of gender, media, and labor in literature and cinema; cybernetics and systems thinking in socialist, post-socialist, and decolonizing Asian states; video art and cinema; and Marxism.

She is a member of the Advisory Board for the Technicities book series (Edinburgh University Press) and serves on the main Editorial Board for Cultural Politics (Duke University Press); re:criticism (Pennsylvania State University Press); Power Currents: Asian Media in the World (University of Pittsburgh Press); and World Picture (University of Toronto Press). She is also Book Review Editor (film/media studies/drama) for MCLC: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture.

 

Elizabeth Wijaya works at the intersection of cinema, philosophy, and area studies. She is especially interested in the material and symbolic entanglements between East Asia and Southeast Asia cinema. Her work emphasizes a multimethodological approach, which is attentive to media forms, ethnographic detail, material realities, archival practices, international networks, and interdisciplinary modes of theorization. She is building an online-accessible collection of Asian short films with UTM library. She is working on her first monograph “Luminous Flesh: The Visible and Invisible Question of Contemporary Diasporic Chinese Cinemas” and her SSHRC Insight Development Grant-funded research project, "Luminous Waves: Visions and Networks of Collaboration in Contemporary Southeast Asian Independent Cinema." She is a co-editor of World Picture Journal. She is also a co-founder of E&W Films . She is an Associate Producer of Taste (2021) directed by Lê Bảo, which received the Special Jury Award of the Encounters Competition at the 71st Berlinale Film Festival, and Associate Producer of Viet and Nam (2024), directed by Trương Minh Quý, which premiered at the Un Certain Regard of the Cannes Film Festival 2024. She is also Co-Producer of Mongrel, which premiered at the Director’s Fortnight of the Cannes Film Festival 2024, and received a Caméra D’Or Special Mention. Mongrel has been nominated in seven categories in the Taipei Golden Horse Awards 2024.

She received her PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where she was affiliated with the East and Southeast Asian Programs. She completed her BA and MA at the National University of Singapore under the ASEAN Scholarship and NUS Research Scholarship, respectively. For 2018–2019, she was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Minnesota (Twin Cities). At the University of Toronto, She received the Connaught New Researcher Award in 2020. For 2020-2021, she is the convenor of “Mediating Race, Reimagining Geopolitics,” JHI-UTM Seminar.

 

Karen Ren is a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute. She holds a BA in Psychology and an MA in East Asian Studies, both from McGill University. Her research interests include Taiwanese cinema and media, slow cinema, queer theory, non-fiction film, and youth culture. For her doctoral work, she aims to examine inter-Asian queer documentaries as vehicles for critical queer regionalism and queer modernity. In addition to her academic pursuits, Karen works with the Hot Docs Documentary Festival, Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival, and Mulan International Film Festival.