Events

Jointly organized by Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Miles Kenney-Lazar, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

PROGRAM

ABSTRACT

For long, humans have conceived of land as inert. Modernization as the institutional control of nature sought to mould this land, as also water, air, minerals, flora, and fauna in the service of economic growth. Building on research from across the social sciences, Nikita Sud’s work rethinks land as the solid, dry surface of the earth. Instead, it presents land as multi-dimensional. Land is imbued with identity and history. It is simultaneously enlivened, territory, property, authority, and a point of contested access and exclusion. Materially and conceptually “unfixed” land is not “naturally” so. It is constantly made and re-made by institutions of the state, market, and politics. In her field sites in post-liberalization, globalizing India, land is sought to be ordered for capitalist development. In the process, a state attempting to order a layered topography is stretched into shadowy domains of informality and unsanctioned practices. A market in land may be advanced, but remains precariously embedded in sociality. Politics may challenge the land-making of the state and market. It may also effect compromises. Attempts at constructing a durable landed order thus reveal our own (dis)orders. In attempting to “make” the land, Sud shows that the land simultaneously “makes” us.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Nikita Sud is Professor of the Politics of Development at the University of Oxford. She is Governing Body Fellow and Vicegerent (Deputy Head) of Wolfson College. She researches the neoliberal transformation of the state and governance in the global south; and the social and political life of nature, especially land and water in the era of climate change. She is the author of the academic monographs The Making of Land and The Making of India (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and The State: A Biography of Gujarat (Oxford University Press, 2012). Besides publishing in journals across the social sciences, Nikita speaks and writes regularly for the media. Her work has appeared in The Conversation, Scroll.in, Wire.in, NDTV, Thomson Reuters Place, Mongabay, Al Jazeera, openDemocracy, East Asia Forum, BBC World Service, Radio 4, Radio France and Mediapart, among others.

Kanti Bajpai is Wilmar Professor of Asian Studies and Director, Centre on Asia and Globalisaion, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. Prior to Singapore, he taught at Oxford University, Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi), and M.S. University of Baroda, and held visiting appointments at the University of Illinois, Wesleyan University, University of Notre Dame, Brookings Institution, Australian Defence Force Academy, Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, and the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. His research interests are international security, India’s foreign policy and national security, and South Asia. His most recent books are India Versus China: Why They Are Not Friends (2021) and Routledge Handbook of China-India Relations (2020; edited with Selina Ho and Manjari Chatterjee Miller). He is currently working on a project on Asian conceptions of international and regional order (with Evan Laksmana).

W. Nathan Green is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. His scholarship critically examines the political ecology of debt, development finance, and agrarian change in Southeast Asia, focusing particularly on Cambodia. Based on ethnographic research in rural Cambodia for his doctoral project, he developed a political ecology of debt framework to explain how the country’s microfinance and land titling programs have exacerbated an inequitable agrarian transformation. His current research builds on this prior work by investigating the subordinated financialization of Cambodia. Using qualitative research with financial leaders, investors, and regulators, he analyzes how financial inclusion has adversely impacted smallholder farmers as the country integrates into global financial and commodity markets. His work has been published in disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals, including Progress in Human Geography, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and The Journal of Peasant Studies.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.