As we approach the end of 2024, I want to take a moment to express my heartfelt gratitude to all who have kindly and generously reached out and supported me. This year has been particularly challenging for me and for my family, and the complexities of ongoing geopolitical and domestic political affairs do not make […]
“Tens of millions of empty urban homes in #China & still a very large population of rural smallholders…yet people are not moving off their rural land…” It was my pleasure to be part of this expert panel chaired by Dr Jane Hayward at Lau China Institute, KCL, on 17 October 2024 as part of its […]
Yesterday marked the end of my five-year directorship of LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. They were enjoyable, exciting and fulfilling years, and I was fortunate to have met thousands of people on various occasions. The attached blog is a summary reflection on my five years. I set out to make the centre more […]
Recently learnt our #Planetary#Gentrification book (Polity Press, 2016) is now out in Simplified Chinese, published by China Architectural Industry Press (中国建筑工业出版社). Yi Jin, my former PhD student and currently based at Nanjing University (Sociology), has kindly secured a few copies for me (see his image attached), and I can’t wait to open them. It’s good […]
Here is an online seminar taking place on 20 March 2023 together with Prof Jonathan Rigg at the University of Bristol. We consider the challenges of publishing in international journals and what steps to take for disseminating one’s research findings to the international audience.
This talk on 2 March is practically the first invited talk I am giving in 2023. It’s going to be on “smart cities as the urban utopia”, and I will be introducing the case of Songdo City, while the other panelist would speak about Ecuador’s Yachay City of Knowledge. It’s been a long while since […]
Pleased to see the release of a special issue from Urban Geography, entitled Urbanising Dynamics of Global China. This special issue was co-edited with Yimin Zhao and Sin Yee Koh, and engages with highly interesting cases from Malaysia, India, Ghana and western China. It’s a collection that results from the previous discussions we had at the RC21 conference in Delhi in September 2019.
Below was a virtual event for me to reflect on what it means to conduct academic writing as scholars in Asia, sharing my thoughts with students and colleagues at the Department of Geography, Chulalongkorn University on 22 July 2022. Title; “Theorising from where? Reflections on scholarly writing from the global East” (online), Virtual Geography Speaker Series […]
New publication release in #openaccess: “#COVID19 in #Southeast#Asia: Insights for a Post-Pandemic World”. All chapters and the entire volume can be downloaded free of charge.Excited to see the release of this new edited volume that has been result of hard labour by SEAC colleagues and collaborators during the pandemic.The volume brings together 38 contributors altogether, […]
December turning into January marks the start of a new year, and I’ve been thinking of how to mark this transition this time round. While the year 2020 is likely to be remembered as a difficult year due to the COVID-19 pandemic (which continues into 2021), I would like to bid farewell to 2020 by […]