Agrarian Transformation in Thailand, and Rural-Urban Interactions

One of the great joys of my work is making videos of conversations with scholars who research about Southeast Asia.

It was my great pleasure and honor to recently make this video of a conversation between Professors Jonathan Rigg and Phan Le Ha.

Dr. Jonathan Rigg, Professor and Chair in Human Geography at the University of Bristol, has been researching and writing about rural transformation in Thailand, and Southeast Asia more generally, for decades. On the occasion of the publication of his most recent book, More than Rural: The Textures of Thailand’s Agrarian Transformation, he sat down for this fascinating discussion.

 

These are some of the issues covered in this fascinating conversation:

02:36 – Jonathan’s intellectual journal from “More than the Soil” (Routledge, 2001) to “More than the Rural” (Hawaii, 2019);

06:40 – The materiality of the urban vs. the values and practices associated with the urban;

10:12 – Moving beyond rural/urban and agrarian/non-agrarian binaries;

12:03 – Urbanization in Asian contexts;

15:52 – The concepts of peri-urban and desakota;

18:58 – The (contested/changing) link between poverty and land;

22:20 – A key point in “More than Rural”;

25:22 – Understanding rural “problems” as strategies.

Encountering a Globalizing Regional University in Southeast Asia

One of my responsibilities in my current position is to make videos of discussions with scholars. The latest video is of a discussion that I had with Phan Lê Hà, founder of the Engaging With Vietnam initiative (which for certain undisclosed reasons I promote on this blog) and currently a Professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and a Senior Professor in the Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education (SHBIE) at Universiti Brunei Darussalam.

Our discussion was about “Higher Education, English, and the Idea of ‘the West’: Globalizing and Encountering a Global South Regional University.” In the following video, Phan Lê Hà discusses her ongoing work on the globalization of higher education in Southeast Asia, East Asia and the Middle East, and details a case study on one particular regional university in Southeast Asia that is actively globalizing by engaging with other Southeast Asian nations.

Although we do not discuss Southeast Asian history in this video, it is interesting to see what is happening today in light of the past, and indeed, as Phan Lê Hà’s work shows, the colonial past and its associated idea of “the West” all loom large in current developments in the world of higher education in Southeast Asia.

Ooi Keat Gin, An Historical Encyclopedia of Southeast Asia, & the State of Southeast Asian Studies

In this video, Professor Victor T. King of the Institute of Asian Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam continues his discussion with Professor Ooi Keat Gin, an historian in the School of Humanities at Universiti Sains Malaysia. They begin by talking about “Southeast Asia: A Historical Encyclopedia, From Angkor Wat to East Timor,” a work that Ooi Keat Gin edited and published in 2004.

Their discussion then goes on to cover the (declining) state of Southeast Asian Studies in the UK and Europe in the twenty first century.

 

China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Southeast Asia

I recently had a talk about China’s Belt and Road Initiative with Bruno Jetin, an economist and the director of the Institute of Asian Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam.

We talked first about Bruno’s academic background and his appreciation for social science research, and then in this second video we talked about the Belt and Road Initiative and the topic of  how Southeast Asia will be affected by this massive development plan.

Introducing Historian Ooi Keat Gin

Ooi Keat Gin is an historian who has written extensively on World War II and its aftermath on Borneo. Among his many works are Rising Sun over Borneo: The Japanese Occupation of Sarawak, 1941-1945 (Springer, 1999), The Japanese Occupation of Borneo, 1941-45 (Routledge, 2010) and Post-War Borneo, 1945-1950: Nationalism, Empire and State Building (Routledge, 2013).

I recently made this video of a conversation that anthropologist Victor T. King had with Ooi Keat Gin about his career and work, and I share it here with anyone who is interested in learning about this historian and his many writings.

A Conversation about Researching Gender and Sexuality with Dr. Khuất Thu Hồng, ISDS (Phần 1)

Last summer, in preparation for the 10th Engaging With Vietnam conference, we had a conversation with Dr. Khuất Thu Hồng, founder and director of the Institute for Social Development Studies (ISDS, Viện Nghiên cứu phát triển xã hội) in Hanoi. Dr. Khuất Thu Hồng will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming conference.

Dr. Khuất Thu Hồng is a pioneering researcher on such topics as gender and sexuality in Vietnam. In this first video, Dr. Khuất Thu Hồng talked about her early career and her first efforts to engage in research on sexuality and gender and to establish the Institute for Social Development Studies.

The conversation is in Vietnamese, and this is the first part.

 

Victor T. King on Tourism and Heritage in Southeast Asia (Part 2)

Here is the second part of a conversation with Victor. T. King about tourism and heritage and tourism in Southeast Asia.

Victor T. King is Professor of Borneo Studies at The Institute of Asian Studies (IAS) at Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD). This video was made as part of a new “IAS @ UBD Conversations” video series. For those who don’t know, the Institute of Asian Studies is an Asian Studies research institute in Brunei.

For more on Victor T. King’s writings on tourism and heritage in Southeast Asia, feel free to visit Professor King’s staff page on the the IAS website.

 

Victor T. King on Tourism and Heritage in Southeast Asia

I recently had a talk with Professor Victor T. King about tourism and heritage in Southeast Asia.

Victor T. King is Professor of Borneo Studies at The Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. He is trained as a cultural anthropologist and has been researching about Southeast Asia, with an emphasis on Borneo, since the 1970s. Information about his scholarly writings on Borneo can be found here.

Victor began researching about tourism and heritage in Southeast Asia in the 1980s, and continues to research about that topic today. In this first video we talk about his interest in this topic, and his history of research, and in subsequent videos we talk more closely about some of the issues in the study of tourism and heritage in Southeast Asia.

A Conversation (in Vnese) with Nguyễn Sử about the History of Vietnamese Calligraphy

This video is of a conversation that we had in the summer of 2017 with Nguyễn Sử, the author of a recent book on the history of Vietnamese calligraphy (Lịch Sử Thư Pháp Việt Nam).

In addition to being an expert on the history of Vietnamese calligraphy, Nguyễn Sử is also a scholar of religion. In early January of 2018, Nguyễn Sử was a keynote speaker at the 9th Engaging With Vietnam conference where he gave a fascinating presentation on the commercialization of religion.

This conversation is in Vietnamese. I will write a post about the book in English soon, and will try to include some of the points covered in this video.

Updating Trần Trọng Dương

A year ago I made some videos of a conversation with scholar Trần Trọng Dương. I recently “updated” those videos by improving the quality of the sound and images.

There are still two videos from this conversation that I have not completed yet, but here are the other seven.