Latest Articles
| 10 mins
19 Jun 2026
On 24 July 2025, clashes at the disputed Ta Muen Thom temple on the Cambodia–Thailand border killed over 30 people and displaced around 300,000, with each side blaming the other. Rather than focusing on geopolitical causes, this essay examines how the conflict is experienced in Cambodia, analysing anti-Thai boycotts through Mary Douglas’s concept of symbolic classification and the construction of the “Thai” as an excluded other.
| 10 mins
13 May 2026
A critical examination of the techno-utopian vision underpinning Nusantara, Indonesia’s new capital city, focusing on how the idea of the smart city is imagined and materialised, while often overlooking the everyday realities of its citizens.
| 10 mins
23 Apr 2026
In mid-2010s, a REDD+ project was piloted with the aim of seeking continuous finance from the voluntary carbon market. Despite project verification, the carbon credits were never issued and sold.
| 7 mins
26 Mar 2026
Artist Akai Chew’s work reimagines urban futures and invites viewers to ruminate on the socio-cultural costs of the city’s transformation, writes Tan Qian Hui.
| 7 mins
27 Feb 2026
From citizen-led food initiatives to one of Singapore’s most biodiverse gardens, Emily Soh's research at ARI has led her into the heart of the city’s evolving food landscape.
| 5 mins
13 Jan 2026
Through a case study of Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions, the legal geographies of money changers reveal how a single space can accommodate multiple, overlapping “maps” of the law.
| 7 mins
12 Dec 2025
While shared repertoires of resistance may form affective chains of reference, the under-the-same-flag discourse risks reducing diverse political struggles to a universal template of youthful rebellion.
| 7 mins
08 Nov 2025
The Suharto debate reveals a larger truth: once reputation hardens into heritage, it becomes difficult to separate memory from myth.
| 5 mins
29 Oct 2025
The relationship between Indonesia and Singapore has long oscillated between pragmatic cooperation and historical discomfort. At its heart lies the question of memory how both nations remember their shared past.
| 5 mins
16 Oct 2025
Urban design, through the creation of walkable neighborhoods and the provision of recreational spaces for instance holds the potential to promote health equity, but only when it takes into account the needs of those most affected.
| 7 mins
15 Sep 2025
Two recent dramatic characterisations of folkloric masculinity—goblin Kim Shin and nine-tailed fox Lee Yeon—challenge dominant anthropocentric portrayals of infantilised, flowery, or wealthy chaebol men in South Korean screen culture. This animistic trope raises feminist anthropological questions about the epistemic and geological foundations of subregional Anthropocene struggles.
| 7 mins
29 Aug 2025
This article explores insights from the ‘ASEAN Spice: The Connecting Cultures of Southeast Asia’ program held in Yogyakarta in May 2024. Beyond conventional narratives of spices as commodities in maritime trade, it examines how plant knowledge reflects embodied cultural practices across Southeast Asia.