In June 2026, the small and charming city of Bloomington in the heart of the Indiana countryside lit up for firefly season – while its university, Indiana University (IU), turned the spotlight on its Taiwan Studies Initiative (TSI), the host of the 31st North America Taiwan Studies Association (NATSA) Annual Conference.
Aimed at fostering research on Taiwan’s culture, society, history, and politics, the TSI was founded within IU’s East Asian Studies Center under the leadership of historian Fei-Hsien Wang, with support in part from Taiwan’s Ministry of Education through the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago.
This year’s conference was chaired by Professor I-lin Liu (劉以霖, IU) and administered by program directors Yu-Chen Chuang (莊淯琛, Pennsylvania State University), Li-Ting Chang (張立亭, UC Santa Barbara), and Yu-Han Huang (黃昱翰, University of Toronto). A tireless team of program commissioners – whose names appear on the 2026 planning committee page – ensured the smooth unfolding of the conference, which ran from June 26 to 28, 2026.
This year’s theme was “Dissonance and Resonance: Taiwan Studies, Knowledge Production, and Power Asymmetry.” Read as a metaphor for contrast, these two ideas framed several panels on power asymmetry – both historical (as in “Taiwan’s Global Cold War”) and structural, such as the vulnerabilities embedded in the legal frameworks governing Indigenous communities.
Across three days, NATSA 2026 hosted more than 80 international scholars – seasoned professors and early-career researchers alike. The opening forum of the conference was titled “Rethinking Settler Colonialism Through Ocean-Centred Perspectives,” and this was followed by two full days of panels spanning a wide range of topics, from music and social movements, with panelists presenting the sonic repertoires of the Bluebird movement and the Great Recall Movement, to art, language, migration, and disinformation, and even the semiconductor industry and the contributions of think tanks such as FAPA and the Global Taiwan Institute to Taiwan advocacy.
One central thread running through all three days of discussions was the situation of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples. Foregrounding the settler-colonial structures that still disempower, render invisible, and threaten the existence of Taiwan’s Indigenous communities, organizers opened with screenings of two films: independent filmmaker Mayaw Biho’s “Children in Heaven” (1997) and Dr. Salone Ishahavut’s (National Central University) “The Elephants Have Walked to Taipei” (2013).
Biho’s film documents the plight of Indigenous encampments during the 1990s, when they faced systematic dismantlement by government action, while keeping its focus on the children living through that precarious context. Salone’s film documents the walk a group of Amis people undertook from Taitung to Taipei to halt construction of the Meiliwan (Miramar) resort.
After the screenings, Biho responded with a pointed, dissonant challenge to the audience — asking whether any mathematician present could explain how the Indigenous share of Taiwan’s population had fallen to the single digits. The room fell silent. On a brighter note, he turned to the pasibutbut, the Bunun polyphonic song, as an image of how Taiwan’s many voices might yet harmonize. That question – and that image – ran through the rest of the conference as one of its strongest leitmotifs.
However uncomfortable, raising awareness is one of the founding goals behind NATSA’s establishment. NATSA was created and run by overseas Taiwanese and North American Ph.D. students in 1994, when the field of Taiwan Studies was experiencing rapid growth and growing international attention. At the same time, Taiwan itself was also undergoing major political, economic, social, and cultural transformation.
Looking back, Taiwanese American advocate Tim Chng (Taiwanese Association of America–Greater Chicago Chapter; FAPA Maryland Chapter) reflected over a meal: “I’ve taken part in these annual meetings throughout the 1990s, and I can tell you that I’ve grown more and more optimistic about Taiwan’s future. Back in the 1990s the topics were much darker.” As he left Bloomington, Chng carried a hopeful smile, noting the contrast between the tone of the 1990s – which he described as a very dark period in Taiwanese society, during which conferences discussed issues such as child trafficking – and this year’s themes, which he called “more luminous.” In his view, those themes reflect and acknowledge the significant progress Taiwanese society has made since democratization.
On the evening of the second day of the conference, second-generation Taiwanese Americans Tim Chng and Ho Chie Tsai – founder of TaiwaneseAmerican.org – took the stage to share their experiences as the sons of exiled pro-democracy advocates in the United States, emphasizing the support the Taiwanese diaspora provided for Taiwan’s democratization.
The closing roundtable brought together Professor Wei-chi Chen (Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica), Professor Robert Tierney (Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Assistant Professor Yuan-Yu Kuan (Department of Music, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa), and Assistant Professor Yen-Yu Lin (Sociology and Anthropology, DePauw University). The discussion stressed the value of studying Taiwan as “a relational site shaped by colonial knowledge production, imperial formations, social hierarchies, and transpacific Indigenous networks.” The goal: to find resonance amid these sometimes dissonant relations and entanglements.
And so, as squirrels, rabbits, and deer moved through the thick midwestern forests outside, the campus of IU Bloomington was an oasis where the Pacific Ocean – framed as a lived, relational space – and Taiwan, one of its most vibrant maritime nations, were the central focus.
Alongside IU’s Media School and its Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the 2026 NATSA Annual Conference was sponsored by the Ministry of Education, the Global Taiwan Institute, the Taiwanese American Foundation, Academia Sinica’s Institutes of History, Ethnology, and Sociology, the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, the Professor Chen Wen-chen Memorial Foundation, the SKB Foundation, Dr. Keelung Hong, Yafan Lu and Guan-tin Chien, the Chiu Program for Taiwan Studies, and FAPA, among others. A full list of sponsors is available on the sponsors page.
Guest reporting by Paola Carollo
