When an all-faculty email was sent on March 12, 2025, inviting interested faculty to lead “Grinnellian Adventures” to Bali, Indonesia, Assistant Professor of Music Putu Hiranmayena responded within 15 minutes. Despite being one of only two Balinese faculty members at Grinnell, Hiranmayena was informed that other faculty, who were not Balinese, had already been selected to lead the trip.
“I got emailed by about six or seven other faculty members or staff members in Grinnell, and also just messaged by people like, ‘Hey, did you see this thing? I feel like the two Balinese people in town should probably at least have a hand in discussing this,’” said Hiranmayena.
Instead, faculty members who had done fieldwork in Indonesia, but were not of Balinese heritage, were chosen to lead the trip. The situation highlights the complex dynamics of representation and identity that Southeast Asian faculty and students navigate at predominantly white institutions like Grinnell.
On April 10, in response to a request for comment from The S&B regarding the faculty selection process for the trip, Guinevere Wallace Natarelli, associate director of alumni and donor relations for reunion programs, wrote, “We have made the decision to cancel the trip to Bali and look forward to future collaboration with the Dean’s Office and faculty to plan future Grinnellian Adventures.”
With only a handful of Southeast Asian faculty and a limited number of Southeast Asian students at Grinnell, questions of representation and identity become particularly significant.
Dewa Ayu Putri, a lecturer in the Department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies who specializes in Balinese dance and happens to be Hiranmayena’s partner, described the feeling of being able to teach her culture directly rather than being the subject of others’ research.
“When I was younger, I was the subject. People were doing a lot of interviews with me for their dissertations or their books,” Putri said. “Now I just feel like I have more power, teaching here from the first-person perspective.”
“When you come to the U.S., it doesn’t matter which region of Asia you’re from. You’re just Asian,” said Sharon Quinsaat, associate professor of sociology who came to the United States from the Philippines as a Fulbright scholar in 2008. “The racialization here is based on pan-ethnicity. They don’t make distinctions.”
For Quinsaat, this flattening of identity exists alongside the reality that Southeast Asia itself is often sidelined in discussions of Asia more broadly.
“Southeast Asia is just … south of China, east of India,” said Quinsaat. “When people talk about Asia they’re often only discussing China, Japan, Korea and India. My Southeast Asian background informs my approach to particular issues. I orient the discussion to include Southeast Asia, not just focusing on the dominant countries in the region.”
Quinsaat noted that many American students come to college with significant knowledge gaps about Southeast Asia, a problem she attributes to systemic issues in American education.
“In my Sociology of Asian America course, while students understand what the Vietnam War is, they look at it from the US lens,” said Quinsaat. “They are largely unaware of the Vietnamese perspective.”
Even Southeast Asian students may have learned versions of history shaped by nationalist narratives, Quinsaat said, recalling a Vietnamese student from Hanoi who was confused when she heard the term “fall of Saigon” rather than “liberation of Saigon.”
Putri has had similar experiences in her classes. “Some students ask a question, and I provide an answer, and then they comment back, ‘But it didn’t say that in this book,’” she said. “The writer of the book is non-Balinese, but I am Balinese. So which one are you going to trust?”
For many Southeast Asian students, finding community can be a challenge when their specific nationality is represented by only a handful of students.
“When you refer to the small size, you’re probably referring to international students, but there are actually many Southeast Asians in terms of children of immigrants — Vietnamese-Americans, Indonesian-Americans, Filipino-Americans,” Quinsaat said.
The challenge, according to Quinsaat, is recognizing commonalities while also acknowledging differences. “Even among groups like Vietnamese or Filipinos, there are still divisions or social cleavages based on social class, gender and region,” she said.
Hiranmayena and Putri have worked to create informal spaces for Southeast Asian students, including hosting events such as a viewing of Disney’s “Raya and the Last Dragon,” followed by a pan-Southeast Asian meal, for Thanksgiving.
“We’re trying to do that at least with our Southeast Asian students, making sure we know that they exist in this framework,” said Hiranmayena. “We’re doing our best with the time we have to at least reach out if there’s something happening.”
All three faculty members described efforts to bring decolonial perspectives to their teaching. For Hiranmayena, this includes rethinking traditional approaches to teaching Balinese gamelan music.
“For so many years, gamelan has been canonized to preserve the relationships that people have with people overseas,” Hiranmayena explained. “Most of the time it’s a white ethnomusicologist tethered to a Southeast Asian interlocutor. This is a good moment for us to have a position of relative power.”
In his Balinese gamelan ensemble, Hiranmayena takes an approach that challenges Western notions of preservation. “At least in our ensembles, we teach traditional methods, but then we go to communal composition almost immediately, because I argue that’s more traditional than really anything else,” he said. “In Bali, especially, you’re negotiating creativity with your cohort. There’s no one being like, ‘Alright, we have to maintain the same song throughout the years.’”
For Quinsaat, decolonizing education includes offering courses that center Southeast Asian perspectives. She is developing a Global Learning Program (GLP) course in Spring 2026 with Professor Xavier Escandell that will take students to Hawaii, South Korea and the Philippines, using Spam (the canned lunch meat) as a lens to examine U.S. imperialism in the region.
“In the long term, I’d really like to take students to Southeast Asia, particularly Indochina, because I want them to learn about the Indochina War from the perspective of people in Southeast Asia — in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam,” Quinsaat said.
The incident with the Bali alumni trip points to broader questions about how institutions like Grinnell engage with and represent diverse cultures.
“We’re literally the ones that are from the place you’re going to,” said Hiranmayena regarding the alumni trip. “Not only that, we’re researching the place that you’re going to actively, and we’re actively trying to decolonize global relationships.”
Quinsaat suggested concrete steps the College could take to better support Southeast Asian perspectives, including offering more courses on Southeast Asia.
“We have East Asian Studies, but there’s no Southeast Asian Studies,” she said. “I would advocate for more courses with Southeast Asian content — courses on colonization, Asian history that covers Southeast Asia, economics discussing the strong economies of Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia.”
For the Southeast Asian faculty interviewed, the goal isn’t just greater visibility but a transformation in how Southeast Asian cultures and experiences are understood and represented.
“We have a different framework and perspective to not only analyze our culture, but also actively change it when necessary or preserve it and conserve it when necessary,” said Hiranmayena. “This doesn’t detract from the fact that we do have allies, and people do respect our culture in various ways, but there’s also a lot of harm and damage done.”
Putri said, “I’m so happy to share my culture, my identity, with the students here. I’m trying to make my class not just about dancing or moving your body, but also about learning a new culture. Bringing some taste of Southeast Asia, specifically Bali, Indonesia.”
