Latest Articles

Dr Sumit Mandal is the new steward of the Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Professorship in Arabia Asia Studies. In this Q&A, Dr Mandal discusses his ongoing interest in developing a language to speak about intermixing, interconnectedness, and diversity and how his interests inform the research activities into Arabia-Asia connections for the Professorship.

As urbanisation and global populations grow, sand has become a crucial resource for land reclamation and protecting urban properties. How should we think of sand in an age of sinking cities and climate change?

The rapid expansion of digital technologies and social media platforms has radically transformed the ways migration is experienced. How has the changing digital space affected Vietnamese migrant movements to Australia?

We all want to know what we are eating but can consumers really trust the process? As observations of Alternative Food Networks (AFN) in China show, the quest to know what happens in the food supply chain is not as simple as it looks.

Inter-regional soldiering ties and transnational mobility link Nepal to Southeast Asia. For former Gurkhas, their transition to entrepreneurship in the highlands of the Himalayas underscores the vital link between transnational soldiering, local tourism, and the socio-economic transformation of the village community.

Are the blue bins in Singapore working? Or is there a deeper problem with recycling practices in our little island-state?

Dr Dhiraj Kumar Mohan Nainani has recently joined us as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Asian Urbanisms Cluster (Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore). In this Q&A, we sit down with Dr Dhiraj to ask how he arrived at his research, his thoughts on the field of legal geography, and his interests outside of academia.

What language should one use when producing Southeast Asian Studies as a scholar based in Latin America? At the heart of this linguistic quandary appears to be between the isolation of the scholar or the underdevelopment of the field in Latin America.

As the China-US rivalry heats up, could invoking a shared memory of cooperation be the key towards a peaceful resolution of regional and global conflicts?

The idea of carbon credit trading is not new but what is it exactly, why does it matter now, and how does it relate to climate justice, especially in the context of Southeast Asia?

Journeying across the Nepal-Tibet border, the sacred landscape juxtaposed against the reality of border controls draws attention to how this historic pilgrimage route has since evolved into structured nation-state entities. Crossing it sheds important light on the complex undercurrents and intersections of geo-politics, religious tourism, transnational citizenship, transnational mobility but also the multifaceted challenges and far-reaching socio-political, cultural and economic ramifications of delineating territorial spaces.

Cultural heritage is deeply intertwined with politics. As it plays a crucial role in shaping a society's identity, values, and collective memory, no political actors, whether states or non-state actors, can ignore the ‘power’ of heritage. With George Orwell’s famous quote from 1984, "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past” in mind, the ways in which cultural heritage is at the center of power struggles, including the ways in which societies come to be ordered in certain ways.