Programs PROGRAMS

The Annual Lecture is the Institute's flagship public event. Each June one speaker is invited to address the questions this neighbourhood has been living through — land, memory, institutional power, and who a city is actually built for.

It is deliberately not a keynote. The lecture is followed by a panel of respondents who are free to disagree, and then by open questions from a room that mixes students, residents, researchers, and people who simply walked in. The argument is the point.

The first edition was delivered on 6 June 2026 by Professor Davarian L. Baldwin of the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College, under the title “Many Sam Yans to Come: The Fight for Heritage and Power in the Age of Smart Cities”. Baldwin's work on universities as landlords and developers speaks directly to Sam Yan, a working-class and ethnically mixed neighbourhood next to Chulalongkorn University that has been worn down by institutionally driven redevelopment.

The lecture is named for Jane Jacobs and for Pansit Torsuwan.

The Sam Yan Asia Residency Fellowship invites scholars, writers, artists, designers, filmmakers, and practitioners to spend time in Bangkok, engage with local communities, develop new conversations, and share their work beyond traditional academic settings.

The first cohort completed its residency in August 2026: two weeks of walking, listening, translating, and building alongside the neighbourhood's own history of struggle and care. Sophia Xiao, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, co-created an exhibition at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre and ran a summer school using Sam Yan as a living case study. Junho Kang, an architect from South Korea, spent his residency asking what a project even is — arriving expecting drawings and models, and leaving with a walking tour, a set of oral histories, and a different way of reading a place.

Fellows present their work in public at Sam Yan Commons, to a room of respondents from other disciplines and anyone who cares to come. Both members of the first cohort left with the question we hope every fellow carries: how do you keep playing a mediating role between research, design, and the people whose neighbourhood this actually is?

Our Public Lecture Series brings scholars, public intellectuals, writers, activists, and practitioners into conversation with wider audiences.

Lectures are designed to make important contemporary debates accessible beyond universities and specialist institutions. Admission is free, recordings are published, and the question period is treated as the point of the evening rather than an afterthought.

The series also hosts evenings that no single discipline owns. In June 2026 the Commons held “Magnifica Humanitas”, a Southeast Asian response to the papal encyclical on artificial intelligence and human dignity, putting Buddhist, Catholic, Muslim and Confucian readings alongside working AI researchers — in a room lined with books rather than a lecture hall.

The Sam Yan Films and Ideas Festival brings together documentary and fiction films with lectures, conversations, performances, and public discussions.

Rather than treating cinema simply as entertainment, the Festival uses film as a starting point for exploring larger questions about society, culture, politics, cities, memory, and human experience.

The 2026 edition ran across four weekends in June. It opened with the first Jane Jacobs & Pansit Torsuwan Annual Lecture, delivered by Professor Davarian L. Baldwin of Trinity College, and closed with a debate on whether Thai society should turn left or right — a lawyer and party leader against a sociologist from Chiang Mai University, in a room that ran well past capacity. Between them sat twenty short films, three book launches, a merit-making ceremony, and an interfaith evening on artificial intelligence.

The Young Ideas Fellowship supports students and early-career researchers, organizers, and makers in Thailand to develop a public project over one academic year — an essay, a small study, a film, a walk, or a series of gatherings.

Fellows receive a stipend, editorial and research mentorship, and a guaranteed public platform at the Commons. The aim is simple: young people should not have to wait for permission, or for a permanent post, to take part in public intellectual life.

The Sam Yan Civic Design Lab is an applied space for experimenting with new forms of civic participation, public space, community engagement, and urban design.

The Lab brings together students, designers, researchers, communities, and practitioners to explore how cities and institutions can become more participatory, inclusive, and responsive to public life. Work is done at the scale of a street, a courtyard, a market, or a single contested block — the scale at which most people actually meet their city.

In July 2026 the Lab ran “Unlearn Urban Studies” with students from the Harvard Graduate School of Design — a two-day camp for high-school and early university students on mapping power, reading the city, and imagining futures that are not finished. Who owns this city, who designs it, who is pushed out, and who is missing from the map.

Sam Yan Heritage Walks use the city itself as a classroom.

Through guided walks, conversations, archival materials, and encounters with local communities, the program explores architecture, religion, political history, urban development, memory, and everyday life in Sam Yan and other parts of Bangkok. A walk is not a tour. It is a way of reading a neighbourhood with the people who live in it.

Alongside its larger programs, the Institute runs the slower work that holds a civic culture together: reading groups, translation workshops, skills sessions for student organizers, and exchanges with universities, institutes, and cultural organizations across Southeast Asia and beyond.

These exchanges are two-way by design. Visitors do not arrive to teach. They arrive to work alongside people who already know the ground.

A three-hour workshop on the distance between caring about animals and changing anything for them.

It opens by taking the question seriously in both directions: why do people actually eat less meat, and what makes that decision hold? The reasons differ — health, cost, ethics, climate, simple taste — and they arrive at the same place.

The middle of the session is an argument against perfectionism. The measure is not whether anyone becomes a model vegan. It is how much suffering is avoided in ordinary life. From there the work turns practical: making plant-based food easy to find, good to eat, and cheap enough to choose, and being straight about what industrial farming actually is.

Everyone leaves having designed something small they can do immediately, and in a network that carries on after the room empties.

Sam Yan Studio is the Institute's documentary and visual storytelling arm.

It develops films, oral histories, interviews, exhibitions, and visual projects exploring civic life, culture, memory, urban transformation, social movements, and the experiences of communities undergoing change. The Studio also records and publishes the Institute's lectures, so that an evening at the Commons can reach someone who could not be in the room.

Its first full exhibition, “Speculative Chula — the university that was never built”, ran for two weeks at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre in July 2026 with Documentary Club and the Civic Design Lab. Drawings, sections and street-level scenes proposed versions of the campus and the blocks around it that were never built. There is no alternative, they said. So we built several.

Music does two things that the algorithm undoes at once. Listening is private; singing is collective. The algorithm does not only choose what reaches you — it arranges for you to listen alone, one earbud in, scrolling, and it never once asks you to sing with anybody.

So the programme is two halves of a single argument rather than two events that happen to share a room. One repairs your relationship with listening, by handing the choosing back to you. The other repairs your relationship with singing, by putting several voices in the same air. Join either, or both.

Five Sunday workshops trace the political history of a genre — Thai songs for life, luk thung against the city's pop, reggae and anti-colonial sound systems, punk and DIY, and finally “world music”, which is not a genre at all but a bin Western labels invented in 1987 to file everything that was not in English. Each session closes with a Digging Hour: screens off, find music yourself instead of taking what you are given, load it onto a player, pass it round the room. Participants keep the player. No feed, no advertising, nothing suggesting what to hear next — only what you chose.

The Solidarity Chorus rehearses protest and revolutionary song from around the world, from the Internationale and Bella Ciao to Phuea Muanchon and March for the Beloved. You do not have to sing well. You have to turn up.

Sam Yan Commons is the Institute's physical home and gathering place.

It hosts lectures, screenings, workshops, exhibitions, performances, fellowships, informal conversations, and community activities.

The Commons reflects one of the Institute's central ideas: civic life needs physical spaces where people can meet freely, encounter unfamiliar ideas, and build relationships across differences.