Events

Jointly organised by the Department of Southeast Asian Studies; and the Asian Urbanisms, and Science Technology and Society clusters at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Fathun Karib, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

In this seminar, Adam Bobbette discusses his award-winning monograph, The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java, which tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia’s volcanoes, demonstrating how the earth sciences originate from a fusion of Western and non-Western cosmology, theology, anthropology, and geology. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and fieldwork at Javanese volcanoes and in scientific observatories, he explores how Indonesian Islam shaped the theory of plate tectonics, how Dutch colonial volcanologists learned to see the earth in new ways from Javanese spiritual traditions, and how new scientific technologies radically recast notions of the human body, distance, and the earth. In the discussion that follows, Faizah Zakaria highlights key interventions that this book makes in the context of an environmental turn in Southeast Asian Studies and identifies some directions that field can go, bringing the book in conversation with her own work, The Camphor Tree and the Elephant. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Adam Bobbette is a human geographer and political geologist based in the University of Glasgow. He works on earth knowledge in Southeast Asia from a global perspective, encompassing the history and politics of the geological sciences since the 17th century, philosophies of minerals, planetary theory, and extractivism. His first monograph The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java (Duke University Press, 2023) won the Harry J. Benda Prize in 2025. He is also the co-editor of New Earth Histories: Geo-cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 2023).

Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor jointly appointed to the Department of Southeast Asian Studies and Malay Studies at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests centre on religion and ecology, environmental justice and indigenous movements in island Southeast Asia. Her first monograph The Camphor Tree and The Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia (University of Washington, 2023) also won the Harry J. Benda Prize in 2025.

REGISTRATION

Please register your interest at https://adambobbette.peatix.com/.