The Intimacies of Kith Conference 2026
Registration Open
"The Intimacies of Kith" seeks to bring together scholars who are also practitioners of poetry from Asian North American and Southeast Asian communities. Our goal is to create a shared space for poet-scholars to engage one another directly, creating opportunities for sustained dialogue across geographic and disciplinary boundaries.
Across disciplines and regions, we are used to policing borders. Poetry is categorised as subjective, and scholarship asked to remain objective; Asia is positioned as origin, with the Asian North American diasporas as its satellites. These distinctions have long shaped our critical and creative imagination. This symposium asks, instead, what kinds of new formulations are made possible by refusing these received borders. What happens when poetry is taken seriously as a mode of thought, rather than as its ornament? How might scholarship better admit and embody the forms of knowledge produced through practice? What kinds of relations emerge when we fully acknowledge the uneven histories between Asia and Asian North American diasporas, without automatically presuming affinity? And what kinds of writing might be required to hold these tensions in view?
This intimate symposium considers the asymmetrical relations and vantage points shaped by migration, empire, and cultural production. Rejecting attempts to reconcile Asia and Asian diasporas into a unified, pan-ethnic formation, we do not approach these asymmetries in order to smooth them out. Rather, under the sign of poetry, we celebrate the capacity of poets to hold contradiction and simultaneity across disciplinary divisions and territorial logics. That is to say, we are interested in how writing itself moves across boundaries. As poetic modes of questioning enter critical discourse, and criticism acknowledges poetic practice as knowledge production, questions of method mirror questions of geography: how do we sustain relation without collapsing difference?
Emerging from panels at AAAS 2024, AWP 2026, and AAAS 2026, The Intimacies of Kith is part of a transnational project led by Samuel Caleb Wee (NTU), Carlina Duan (UNC Chapel Hill), and Jasmine An (University of Oregon) that will culminate in an edited essay collection. We are delighted to bring Divya Victor, Paisley Rekdal, and Timothy Yu to Singapore as keynote speakers for the symposium!"