Despite consensus on the movement of peoples from mainland Asia to Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific over the past five thousand years, the mode of dispersal and biocultural change remains highly contested. While some hypotheses posit agriculturalists and Austronesian language speakers rapidly dispersing via Taiwan, other scenarios postulate, for example, additional dispersal routes, the gradual adoption of agricultural practice, and dynamic language borrowing. While at SCAS, Hugo Reyes-Centeno will assess current debates in a project entitled “Genomic and archaeological approaches toward resolving the Austronesian problem,” by critically synthesizing models developed from linguistic, archaeological, and genetic lines of evidence and by harnessing original archaeological data collected from the Philippine archipelago.

Hugo Reyes-Centeno will be a Human Past Senior Fellow at SCAS during the autumn semester of 2025.

Therapeutic culture has emerged as an influential force in shaping contemporary subjectivities. Yet, there are many unexplored questions about how it interacts with collective identities, belonging and affective polarization. Feyda Sayan-Cengiz’s project explores this interaction in the context of Turkey, where deep affective polarization along Islamic and secular lines coincides with the growing popularity of divergent trajectories of Islamic-oriented and secular therapeutic discourses. Do therapeutic discourses offer alternative sources of identification and emotional attachment beyond discourses of polarization? Or do they make individuals more vulnerable to identity politics, positioning them as fragile subjects seeking recognition for collective traumas? By engaging with these questions, the project seeks to provide new insight into how therapeutic culture is situated within contemporary contestations over identity and belonging.

Feyda Sayan-Cengiz will be a Barbro Klein Fellow at SCAS in the spring of 2026.