A student-led symposium – Social Studies Symposium: First Feast

On April 19th, 2025, Social Studies Symposium—Fulbright’s first student-led initiative for Social Studies major—hosted the full-day event: Social Studies Symposium: First Feast (SSS: First Feast). As a symposium by students and for students, SSS: First Feast brought together over 60 participants within and beyond the Fulbright community, who all shared a passion for Social Studies and interdisciplinary inquiry.

Founded in September 2024, Social Studies Symposium aims to cultivate an open, dynamic, and engaging community for every Fulbright student to share intellectual curiosities, research interests, and meaningful conversations. During the AY2024-2025, the SSS team has organized film screenings, topic-based discussions, and career sharing sessions to help foster the Social Studies community at Fulbright. SSS: First Feast marks a milestone in this journey, representing a commitment to knowledge and a spirit of collective learning.

Embracing Diversity in Knowledge Exchange

The symposium was co-organized by Nguyễn Huy Hoàng and Nguyễn Thị Minh Tâm, both senior students majoring in Social Studies. While participating in Capstone meetings with faculty and other students, Minh Tâm was motivated to create a close-knit community to share and discuss what she learned at Fulbright: “In our bi-weekly Capstone meetings, we get to share our ideas and listen to each other. This is where I feel the spirit of peer support most strongly. We were genuinely interested in others’ topics, and would reach out when we came across something relevant to friends’ research.”

Drawing on this ethos, SSS: First Feast invited Fulbright students and alumni to bring their academic work out of the classroom to join a broader dialogue with like-minded peers. The event’s name (“First Feast”) comes from the practice of ancient Greek philosophers gathering over food to share intellectual thoughts. However, SSS: First Feast attempts to move beyond these traditionally Western-dominated spaces, making knowledge production more inclusive by embracing the voice of students from different backgrounds, interests, and perspectives.

As such, Mai Quỳnh Trang, a presenter for the panel on “Human Sins: Bodies’ Impurities,” commented on “the variety of colors, with uniqueness and depth of each on its own, all amounting to a feast indeed.” Not only so, through the symposium, Trang also “got to know the chefs that presented and organized the feast, to witness a shared fire in each person, unassuming but undeniable, and see how it glued them all.”

A Celebration of Interdisciplinary Discussion

Throughout morning and afternoon sessions, six student-led panels explored various topics, including material & visual culture, linguistics, gender and sexuality studies, and science & technology studies. Each panel featured a 10- to 15-minute presentation, followed by a moderated discussion that encouraged engagement and questions from participants both online and in person.

From questions such as how technology shapes our society, to theoretical applications of decolonizing coffee and weaving social movements in Vietnamese arts, each session not only highlighted diverse academic interests of Fulbright students, but also affirmed that different fields of knowledge are closely related and complementary.

Through the symposium, Nguyễn Lê Tuấn Kiệt, a presenter on the panel of “Arts and Practices of Display/Identity,” “has managed to reflect on the use of ethnographic and anthropological methods in art history research.” Presenting on artist Lê Nguyên Phương’s works, Kiệt not only reconnects with his long-inspiring interlocutor but also gives back in return, enabling Phương to expand discussions about his work in Australia. 

Appreciation of Students’ Academic Works

Dr. Elizabeth Miles, the current major coordinator for the department of Social Studies at Fulbright, rounded up her appreciation of the symposium: “I am continuously in awe of Social Studies students, of all students at Fulbright, to be honest. The rigor of the presentations and the engagement of the audience is a testament to the intellectual creativity and curiosity of our students.”

Looking ahead, SSS: First Feast sets the foundation for recognizing student work and sparks mutual discussions. Huy Hoàng, co-organizer of the symposium, shared that SSS wished to serve as a dynamic space for active engagement, which means “discussing, talking, writing, sharing, and even publishing.” He also commented on SSS’s future vision: “The next goal of SSS is to create a student journal publication for Social Studies. This flows out of my desire to hear other students’ voices, to see, even as undergraduate students, we all have important things to say and hear from each other.” 

By calling attention to the values of student work, Social Studies Symposium aspires to be an inclusive, collaborative, and engaging platform for the broader journey of knowledge acquisition at Fulbright and beyond.