Please join us in person or online for presentations and discussion on an ongoing research project:

Infrastructure and Circulations in Southeast Asia (and Beyond)
24 October 2023, 4:00pm – 5:30pm
Subaltern Room, RCSD, Faculty of Social Sciences, Chiang Mai University
Participants can join online via this Zoom link:

This collective presentation aims to share and discuss some of the ongoing research carried out as part of the project “Environing Infrastructure: Communities, Ecologies, and China’s “Green” Development in Contemporary Southeast Asia”, based at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (Munich, Germany). The four members of the project will each introduce their work, and open up a few questions for broader conversation. The goal is to stimulate discussion and exchange, spur connections and possible collaborations. Alessandro will start off with a brief description of the overall aims of the Environing Infrastructure project (for more info, see www.environing.asia), and how it shifted from an initial focus on infrastructure to one centred on heterogeneous connections.

Alessandro will then introduce his current project on amber, with a particular focus on the China – Myanmar borderlands. Huiying will share her doctoral research on agroecology in Thailand, addressing the material and social infrastructures that have enabled a range of practices, including community – based organic agriculture, highland coffee agroforestry, and governmental research and extension work on soil improvement, and how these local and internal dynamics interact with interests within the Mekong – Lancang countries, and global commercialisation of forests and soil. Roger will follow with a general framing overview of his ongoing project on the experiences of privilege and precarity among highly skilled Global South – South migrants. He will then focus on one of the core case studies of the project: Sihanoukville, Cambodia. Jessica’s talk, based on her ongoing work in Flores, Indonesia, will discuss what has been happening to rural families and young people amidst Indonesia’s widespread development growth and COVID’s more recent economic downturn. Her research asks what are the consequences of being contemporarily remote from household and individual perspectives?

Presenters

Alessandro Rippa

Alessandro is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo; and Project Director at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munic h. He is the author of “Borderland Infrastructures: Trade, Development and Control in Western China” (Amsterdam University Press, 2020).

Huiying Ng
Huiying’s doctoral research project at the Rachel Carson Center focuses on agroecological futures in Thaila
nd and the learning assemblages that form to support them, with a long-term view towards supporting the growth of regional food systems through participatory action research.

Roger Norum
Roger is a researcher at the Rachel Carson Center and the University of Oulu (Finland). His research concerns connections between mobility, media and the environment, particularly among transient communities in South and Southeast Asia, and the Arctic.

Jessica Clendenning
Jessica is a research fellow at the Rachel Carson Center, LMU Munich. Her research interests include agrarian change and young people, social reproduction and (non)migration, and aspirations and the future, in Indonesia and wider Asia