les voix: For/Getting｜Re/Membering

是的，要有感才有受，這或許就是 “felt sense” 的奧義。

今年特別有感，或許剛好我從頭到尾都有微微參與到，看著人哭、看著人笑，從不解到諒解、從誤解到和解——有爭執、也有擇善固執，但更多的是糾結、掛懷、彼此確認，為了創造出一個更多元但安全的空間

致詞時，其實我自己也邊唸稿，邊覺得很激動（但也有可能是太緊張，腎上腺素飆升）（但也有可能是真的感動，但好像抖得太誇張了）

或許因為對我來說，從一開始NATSA就真的是 starting with friendships，然後這幾年下來 still continuing because of new friendships——not the kind that flatten difference, but ones that hold it gently

——所以想分享我的稿子，自己也留念一下——

Thank you for staying with us until the very end of the 30th NATSA conference.

Today I’m honoured to be invited to offer some reflections “from within the margins” – thinking with care and critique concerning what NATSA has been, and what it could become.

\\ From Home to Horizon //

NATSA has been more than an academic conference. It has felt like a home for many of us, especially diasporic, minoritarian, and student voices.

Over the past three decades, Taiwan has been reimagined from a case, subject, and model to a node connecting the various worlds – symbolic and material, virtual and actual, global north and global south, visual and sensical, imperial and colonised, religious and secular.

But more importantly, it has also been an affective and communal space – felt and embodied, not just made sense of and theorised.

We are here because NATSA has made room for us. And therefore, the question I want to ask is: how might it continue to do so, meaningfully and structurally?

\\ From Identity to Globality //

The early NATSA years – 1995 through 2006 – were deeply shaped by Taiwan’s transition to democracy, and, geopolitically, where the world was envisioning the end of history in the post-Cold War era.

We talked about recognition, visibility, identity, and nationhood. These were necessary beginnings, rooted in the urgency of that political moment.

But from 2007 onward, as Taiwan was increasingly framed through the “China effect” and global comparisons, another set of voices started to slip away.

Geopolitics dominated, and marginalised perspectives – such as Indigenous struggles, queer lives, migrant and care labour – were often treated as footnotes rather than frameworks.

So here, I further ask: Who gets to define global Taiwan? And who gets made legible – under what terms?

\\ Reflexivity and Resilience //

From 2017 to 2019, a reflexive turn emerged. We asked how we study Taiwan, not just what we study.

This epistemological and methodological shift not only resonated with the critical interventions in area studies, including those about Taiwan, but also reflects the ontological, narrative, and deconstructive turn in different fields of social sciences and humanities, which, of course, has left a mark on how Taiwan is understood and conceptualised.

This was intellectually exciting. But still, whose practices were recognised as theory? Did migrant or disabled knowledge ever count as a method?

Then came 2020 and beyond: COVID, authoritarian threats, health inequities. Taiwan was applauded for its “resilience”. But resilience can be double-edged.

When the term circulates without critique, it risks individualising and depoliticising harm. We celebrate survival, but who is expected to endure quietly? This is the question may panels asked some years ago.

NATSA has given us a space to grieve and cheer, yes. But we also have to think: whose stories are uplifted, demonstrated, and used as examples, but whose remain relatively omitted?

\\ The Otherwise and Its Risks //

The theme of this year – Toward an Otherwise in Taiwan and Beyond – is powerful.

It gestures toward feminist, queer, crip, Indigenous, and decolonial futures, as we could sense and detect from the Call for Papers. And it gives us a name to what many in our communities have long lived and embodied.

But calling for “the otherwise” is also potentially a risk. If ungrounded, it can become vague, in complicity with a rhetoric without transformation.

Thus, turning such a promise into praxis means changing not only what we study and think with, but how we gather, how we cite, and how we relate in light of a commonly shared love or hate for Taiwan – as a place, a society, a confusing nation, as well as a confused people.

NATSA can be more than a platform. It can be a method: collective, care-based, and accountable, as we’ve witnessed in recent years.

\\ NATSA as Method—Taiwan’s ‘Beyond’ //

Let’s reflect on the “beyond” in this year’s theme. It can mean diasporic kinship, a community of differences, South-South solidarities, or another geopolitical triangulation between China and the US.

I suggest we reclaim “beyond” not as expansion, but as interdependence. I say this to problematise the perception that Taiwan is a stable signifier of an entity with fixed territories, a specific way of living and governing, or a uniform culture.

Only by imagining something as one thing that is definable, to go “beyond” indicates independence from elsewhere.

However, the realities are actually that where we are related to others, as we learn from different panels and presentations, such as the ones I moderated regarding care work and labour, queer love and eco-sexualities, as well as those about unruly and disabled desires.

Within Taiwan, whether we like it or not, we can’t live without points of reference to others, which may not necessarily be China as we learnt from the events about Cold War haunting us in relation to other Southeast Asian societies or translocal activisms across Taiwan, Hong Kong and Tibet, from which we affirm our existence, whether included or excluded from the mainstream.

Similarly, we can’t really talk about and theorise Taiwan without knowing what Taiwan is not, namely, we also need to know and understand what other places or cultures are.

As the queer theorist, Eve Sedgwick argues, allo-identification, namely, identifying with others, occurs simultaneously with auto-identification, in which a capital “Us” can be foregrounded – a personal and a collective identify is constructed, consolidated, and of course, contested.

Relationality must come from shared struggle, not just shared discourse. No matter if such relationality is aligned with the solidarity of the ideal type or not.

In any way, community-building across differences is always messy – it’s slow and sometimes uncomfortable. But it’s necessary, as NATSA has been doing and working on.

\\ NATSA@30...and NATSA@60? //

Let’s celebrate how far we’ve come: NATSA is a student-led space, a living archive of Taiwan Studies in its mainstream and critical forms, and in its normative and, as we heard more and more in recent NATSAs, alternative ways of being understood.

It is a space of care, of political formation, of difficult conversations.

If today is another point of departure, I try to prefigure what NATSA@60 will remember us for?

Let it be that we treated the margins not as an afterthought, but as epistemic anchors. That we didn’t just include differences – we started from them.

\\ Final Reflection //

Following my observations and conversations with people in the past few days, we can at least “feel” that NATSA, as a space of collective labour and affective moments, has moved us from “beyond” to “otherwise,” a framework grounded in radical interdependence.

Working across differences is not just a theme; it’s a commitment to responding to historical injustices and traumas and contemporary inequalities in various forms – be they about sacrifices of people during the war and cold-war time, the mainstream society’s unapologetic attitudes to settler colonialism, or manipulation of well-intended concept such as intersectionality to justify harms against trans and non-binary folks.

And so, I close my part with gratitude, ongoing critique, and a sense of belongingness. This is also a commitment to a NATSA accountable to all who reside, work, and resist within, throughout, and beyond Taiwan.

Thank you very much.