Conference Paper Presentation
Translating Culture Across Screens at MARAAS 2025
Ned Legaspi presented a paper on culturally intelligent storytelling at the 53rd Annual Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies Conference, hosted by the University of Pittsburgh.
The presentation placed Southeast Asian storytelling within a wider scholarly conversation on transnational movement, translation, technology, and cultural meaning.
The Conference
Asian Networks: Transnationalism, Technology, and Equity
The 2025 MARAAS Conference examined how movement, connectivity, technology, and transnational networks shape Asia and the wider world. It brought together scholars working across the humanities, social sciences, cultural studies, education, media, and related fields.
Hosted by the University of Pittsburgh Asian Studies Center, the conference returned to Pittsburgh after ten years. Its program reflected regional, transnational, and interdisciplinary approaches to understanding Asia as part of an interconnected world.
Ned's paper contributed a Southeast Asian media and storytelling perspective to this wider academic exchange.
The Paper
Translating Culture Across Screens: Culturally Intelligent Storytelling as Narrative Infrastructure in Southeast Asia
The paper examined culturally intelligent storytelling as more than a creative technique. It proposed it as a form of narrative infrastructure that can help stories move across media, markets, and cultural contexts without becoming detached from their roots.
Cultural Grounding
Stories begin within specific histories, identities, values, and communities. Translation should not erase those foundations.
Movement Across Screens
Narratives change as they move across platforms, industries, languages, and audiences. Each movement requires cultural judgment.
Narrative Infrastructure
Frameworks can help creators make consistent and responsible decisions as stories travel through complex cultural systems.
Panel A3
Transnational and Translation: Moving Meaning
Chaired by Yuping Zhang, the panel brought together research on music, dance, public discourse, translation, and storytelling across borders.
Listening Across Borders: Ghazals, Cultural Memory, and Digital Audiences
Ali HassanA study of cultural memory and digital listening across borders.
Queerness as Epiphytism: The Transnational Movement of Gay Dance “Waacking”
Raymond Kyooyung RaAn examination of how a dance form traveled from the United States to South Korea.
Constructing a Straits Chinese Public Discourse
Zhinan JiResearch on writing, translation, and public discourse in the Straits Chinese Magazine.
Translating Culture Across Screens
Ned LegaspiA Southeast Asian framework for culturally grounded storytelling across media and cultural contexts.
Stories do not simply cross borders. They pass through systems of interpretation, power, memory, and cultural expectation. Presentation premise
Why It Mattered
Bringing Storytelling Practice into Asian Studies
The presentation created a bridge between professional storytelling practice and academic inquiry. It drew from three decades of work with global Filipino audiences while engaging questions of translation, transnational movement, identity, and cultural power.
It also extended the CIS Bamboo Framework beyond a book or creative methodology. Within the conference, the framework became a way of thinking about the systems that enable stories to circulate and acquire meaning across different contexts.
For Ned, the paper was part of a continuing effort to connect media practice, Philippine Studies, communication, and cultural intelligence.
Continue Exploring
From Conference Paper to Framework and Practice
C3 Bamboo Framework
Explore the broader framework connecting Culture, Communication, and Connection across Stories, People, and Nations.
Explore the FrameworkCulturally Intelligent Storytelling
Learn about the book and the CIS Bamboo Framework developed for Southeast Asian creators.
Explore the BookSpeaking
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