Written by Ting-Sian Liu and Yi-Ting Chung.
Image credit: NATSA.
“Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression,” quoting from Audre Lorde, Yi-Ting Chung opened the closing forum of the NATSA 2025 conference.
Marking its 30th annual conference this year, NATSA continued its commitment to building a community across disciplinary and political differences. In this spirit, the Program Directors and the President of NATSA 2025—An-Ru Chu, Ting-Sian Liu, and Yi-Ting Chung—envisioned the Closing Forum as a space to honour the organising work of NATSA teams past, present, and future. Drawing inspiration from the Observers’ Program first introduced at the 24th conference in 2018, we invited three scholars—Mei-Chun Lee, Po-Han Lee, and I-Lin Liu—each of whom has been involved in NATSA’s organising in different capacities. They were invited to observe, participate in, and initiate dialogues throughout the conference proceedings. Through their diverse academic training and standpoints, they offered reflections and critical feedback on this year’s central theme, “Toward the Otherwise in Taiwan and Beyond,” and on how the 30th conference engages with this concept in practice.
Looking backwards, moving forward
The forum began with Yi-Ting’s reflection on the historical trajectory and the political possibilities of NATSA as an academic organisation and a community led by PhD students. With the group photo from the first annual Taiwan Studies Conference in North America projected in the background, Yi-Ting revisited the founding history of NATSA and its defining characteristics—an activist-driven scholarship and an understanding of the conference as a collective, community-building endeavour. Founded in 1994 by a group of Taiwanese graduate students in the United States, NATSA emerged at a time when there was little academic space dedicated to the systematic study of Taiwan. Closely connected to the democratisation movement, these early scholars approached the organising of NATSA in the spirit of activism. This ethos has since been carried forward and reinterpreted by subsequent generations of scholars. As Yi-Ting noted, our scholarship in Taiwan continues to be deeply driven by concern and care for it. Setting the tone with reflections on NATSA’s historical roots, the speakers that followed guided us through the organisation’s thirty-year journey from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives.
Firstly, Mei-Chun Lee opens up the grand scenario of NATSA, analysing the conferences from the outset. Following, Po-Han Lee critically examines NATSA’s conference theme each year, providing an insider’s felt sense through the margins. Lastly, I-Lin Liu shared his notes and takeaway from the participant observation during the NATSA 2025, proposing directions for experimenting with other ways of conference organising.
Our first speaker, Mei-Chun Lee, affiliated with the Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica, has analysed and visualised the available data on NATSA’s submission over the past three decades. She examined the geographical location of the presenter and used the visualisation of the word clouds to showcase how the presentation titles of NATSA shifted through different time periods. In the early stage from 1995 to 2004, the presentation titles focused on the political and cultural aspects of Taiwan, with the keywords on the state, identity, and language. From 2005 to 2014, the keywords of Indigenous, colonial and national emerged through, and with the titles of China and Identity continued to be a focus in the presentations. From 2015 to 2024, keywords of movement, policy, Cold War, China, identity, politics, and Indigenous continued to be top of the presentation lists. Mei-Chun concluded by tracing how NATSA’s focus over the past thirty years has shifted—from politics, identity, and China, toward decoloniality, queerness, activism, and care—marking NATSA 2025 as an ongoing process of becoming. Ending the note on the concept of otherwise as an ethico-onto-political commitment, Mei-Chun reminds us how “otherwise” as a feminist keyword lies in its offering of a scholarship that does not demand mastery but a scholarship of solidarity that flight away from what we thought we have always known, bearing this as the reminder of how our scholarships on Taiwan could entail and redirect toward.
Speaker Po-Han Lee, affiliated with the National Taiwan University, echoed Mei-Chun’s notes on the concept of feminist solidarity rooted in otherwise, starting with “Critical Reflection From Within the Margins” that elucidates the relationship between Taiwan, Taiwan Studies, and NATSA. Po-Han provided critical reflections on the conference themes of NATSA across decades. From 1995 to 2016, early themes focused on visibility and democracy under the backdrop of the rising globalised Taiwan; however, it sidelined marginalised voices. With the next decade focusing on reflexivity and resilience, it highlighted Taiwan’s resilience and resistance as a keywording and re-worlding strategy, but Po-Han reflects on how resilience narratives could risk depoliticising structural harm. Po-Han then encouraged us to approach “the Otherwise” as the invitation toward feminist, queer, crip, Indigenous, and decolonial futures with the challenges going beyond lip service to sustained praxis.
Thinking-feeling-doing a Taiwan Studies conference
Po-Han signposted us a few directions of thinking about NATSA moving forward and the potential NATSA as a community holds for imaging and practising radical interdependence, solidarity-building, and commitment to accountability. First of all, NATSA has been more than a conference but a home and a space of collective labour, care, and thought. Po-Han mentioned that despite community-building across differences being messy, it is necessary in a way that it continues to shape, debate, and transform itself. Furthermore, a reminder to approach Taiwan’s “beyond” not merely as geopolitical triangulation or expansion but as South-South solidarity and interdependence rooted in shared struggles. With gratitude and critique, Po-Han invited us all to think about how NATSA can continue to work toward all those who reside and resist within Taiwan.
Speaker I-Lin Liu, our 2026 NATSA President, affiliated with Indiana University Bloomington, shared his learning journey with the concept of otherwise through participating in the conference. I-Lin mentioned that following the direction of the “otherwise” and connecting Taiwan Studies with Black, feminist, queer, and Indigenous studies feels like learning a new language and sparking new conversations and relationships. I-Lin mentioned that he sought to understand the relationship between the otherwise and Taiwan Studies itself, and thus had the questions on how presenters construct “the mainstream” of Taiwan Studies and what otherwise visions they present, and the evaluation around this alternative narrative. Through I-Lin’s observation, some presentations on settler colonialism in Taiwan, which unsettle the hegemonic narratives of Taiwanese history as a postwar country of successful modernisation and democratisation, reveal Taiwan as a settler colonial state that requires examination.
I-Lin then provides another observation on how the Felt workshop provides an otherwise methodology through the practice of close listening and performance. In the workshop, participants were invited outside the Encina Hall and listened to the sound via a paper-made ear horn. Participants were then expected to convey to the group what they were listening to, not through verbal words but through sound, movement, and emotion. I-Lin shared how the workshop opened up the avenues of carrying forward the method of close listening and performance, and how to integrate it into our everyday lives and research. I-Lin ended his remarks on how NATSA could continue to build communities that engage meaningful dialogues with other minor or marginalised disciplines and consider experimenting with new ways of conference organising and preparation, such as hosting mini pre-conference workshops or reading groups in the future.
Community-Building as the Labour of Care
As the panellists shared their bodily experiences of this year’s conference, it is worth noting how many lingered on the topic of affect, recalling moments from the felt workshop and the literature event. In many ways, this mirrored how our program design sought to honour sensory ways of knowing and unknowing, as the conference unfolded through shifting textures of sound, sight, and sensation.
Also sitting at the centre of this year’s conference planning were the unique challenges of organising amid seismic political shifts on both sides of the Pacific. Po-Han, sharing his experience as a participant, noted that this was the first time he had felt uneasy about entering the United States. Yet, he also observed that holding the conference in the US allowed NATSA to engage with questions still difficult to confront in Taiwan—such as critically examining US imperialism and applying the framework of settler colonialism to the case of Taiwan.
Working across differences for the sake of community building, particularly during a politically challenging time, was neither simple nor straightforward. Yet it was not a task to be passed on, for thinking-feeling-doing a Taiwan Studies conference is not merely an academic exercise but an act of collective becoming. It is through the shared gestures of care—organising, remembering, and imagining—that NATSA continues to reinvent what it means to study Taiwan in relation to the world. As the closing forum reminds us, scholarship, too, can be a form of belonging—an unfinished conversation carried forward by each generation that gathers, once again, to feel, to think, and to work together.
Ting-Sian Liu (she/they) is a PhD candidate in Gender at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests include race and ethnicity, queer theory, and social movements. She received her M.A. in Gender Studies at SOAS, University of London and B.A. in Anthropology at National Taiwan University. She served as the co-Program Director, along with An-Ru Chu, at NATSA 2025.
Yi-Ting Chung (she/her) is a PhD candidate in History at Stanford University, specializing in East Asian and transpacific history. She received her M.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University and her B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Waseda University. She served as the President of the North American Taiwan Studies Association from 2024 to 2025. Her current dissertation research examines how the colonial subjects of the Japanese empire—Taiwanese and Koreans—traversed the Pacific while treading the complex boundaries of war, empire, and race between the Japanese, Chinese, and the US empires in the first half of the twentieth century (1900-1950s).
This article was published as part of a special issue on ‘NATSA: Toward an Otherwise in Taiwan and Beyond‘.
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