Experiential learning is fundamental to geography education. Yet, international field schools, particularly those involving collaborations between institutions in the Global North and South, are subject to ongoing critique concerning asymmetrical power dynamics. While current pedagogical literature focuses heavily on student development and cross-cultural competence, it has not fully examined the academic partnership model itself. This paper addresses this gap by reflecting on the design, implementation, and outcomes of a jointly managed field school co-run by a U.S. university and partner institutions in Southeast Asia. The analysis draws on diverse data sources, including student and faculty reflections from the field, outcomes from an international post-school workshop, and professional roundtable discussions on reciprocity in research. Our findings reveal that students participating in joint international field schools benefit from cross-cultural peer-to-peer learning that mitigates many of the pitfalls of short-term programs. They not only add value to the affective appreciation of the place they are studying but also of the various local institutions, which would be instrumental for building future collaborations across regions. The joint field school functions as a deliberate strategy for cultivating parity and mutual capacity-building. This approach lays a foundation for sustained, equitable institutional collaboration and collective knowledge production.

Collaboration in the context of international fieldwork serves to elevate the skills of all members involved while simultaneously contributing to a robust body of observations. This paper reflects on methodological lessons from a Collaborative Southeast Asia Summer Field School where graduate and undergraduate students from Universitas Hasanuddin, Sulawesi, Indonesia (UNHAS), Khon Kaen University, Thailand (KKU), and University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, USA (UHM) came together to learn how to conduct research collaboratively. Guided by mentors from these three institutions, our multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural group participated in collaborative field schools at three field sites — two in South Sulawesi; and one in Khon Kaen, Thailand — where we continued, and built upon our local partners’ existing research projects and priorities in these areas. Each group focused on ‘following’ specific crops and commodities in different contexts, adopted and adapted multiple research methods, engaged with diverse team members and communities across various languages and landscapes, was guided by different fieldwork objectives and overarching questions, and yielded distinct findings. Despite these differences, all three groups shared a general aim to understand socio-economic and environmental transitions in Southeast Asian rural societies. Through collaborative and comparative reflections on challenges and adaptations before, during, and after fieldwork in both sites, this paper discusses how using collaboration as a research method has (re)shaped team members’ understandings of our research, Southeast Asia as a region, and ourselves. Importantly, we reflect on how this experience has shaped our future collaborative research in, and of Southeast Asia, and how we might apply these methodological lessons in our own research projects.

In rural, upland northern Thailand, Indigenous Karen (Paganyaw) communities have long practiced diversified subsistence cultivation and forest-based livelihoods. Yet state conservation policies and tourism-led development are reshaping these agrarian systems and livelihoods. This paper explores how one Karen community in Chiang Mai province reconfigures its livelihood strategies amid the decline of swidden cultivation and the rise of elephant tourism as a new rural economy. Beyond subsistence cultivation, villagers are seeking to diversify their households and personal income by participating in this new economic sector. We argue that the transition out of small-scale agriculture into tourism is not a neutral market choice, but responds to the same political-economic pressures that have historically displaced swidden systems. Drawing on 32 qualitative interviews, this ethnographic research examines diverse forms of Indigenous involvement in the elephant tourism supply chain crucially determined by non-capitalist social relations and kinship networks. By identifying the socio-economic conditions – land and capital ownership, and familial and social networks – that result in socially-differentiated and stratified allocation of benefits from elephant tourism, while simultaneously revealing one empirical case of how Indigenous peoples navigate shifting economies and sustain meaning in their livelihood.

In the Pga K’nyau village of Ban Huay E Kang in the Chiang Mai province of northern Thailand, a newborn’s umbilical cord is placed inside a bamboo container and hung from a tree. This is a sacred act of establishing a lifelong connection between each villager and the forest. The practice is known in the Pga K’nyau language as de paw thoo. This tradition has faced significant disruption from state-led conservation policies and the institutionalization of childbirth in state hospitals, which Ban Huay E Kang villagers contest through their revitalization of de paw thoo. Based on collaborative ethnographic research, we examine how spiritual, ecological, and cultural relationships structure Pga K’nyau epistemologies. In this research project, we ask: how is knowledge of de paw thoo transmitted and mobilized by women in Ban Huay E Kang to access resources? This paper argues that Pga K’nyau women in Ban Huay E Kang strategically transmit and mobilize de paw thoo as evidence of their long-standing relationship with the forest, to contest state territorialization, resist extractive state policies, and assert cultural belonging. We argue that de paw thoo functions not solely as cultural memory but as a dynamic tool for ecological governance that contests state territorialization and resists extractive policies. Drawing on feminist political ecology, the project investigates the tensions and innovations within these practices of intergenerational ecological knowledge transmission. This paper contributes to emerging scholarship on how gender, cosmology, and environment intersect in the making and remaking of Indigenous knowledge in upland Southeast Asia. De paw thoo serves as a lifeline of knowledge and a strategic political claim that secures the community’s reciprocal relationship with their ancestral land.