Events

This roundtable is a pre-workshop discussion for the Third China Made Workshop: The Social Life of Chinese Infrastructures in Southeast Asia. 

Mindful of the third China Made workshop’s empirical focus on lived experiences of Chinese infrastructures in Southeast Asia, whilst taking stock of earlier and current case studies, this roundtable focuses on theoretical agendas raised by BRI as it edges closer to its second decade in 2023. In doing so, we echo the workshop’s aim to: “produce new synergies across disciplines and areas of research, while intervening in critical theoretical discussions of infrastructure in social science and humanities scholarship, in and outside of China and Southeast Asian Studies”.

The first decade of BRI has brought questions regarding China’s policies and impacts in terms of cultural, environmental, geopolitical and economic dimensions. Yet within work on the nature of BRI and its consequences, consideration of BRI’s implications for theory remain relatively underdeveloped. This roundtable is an attempt at theoretical stock-taking and reflection. As distinct from our previously convened work on “Research agendas raised by BRI” (Sidaway, Rowedder, Woon, Lin and Pholsena, 2020), this roundtable seeks explicitly theoretically committed reflections from/in the context of BRI.

Topics for the roundtable may include any of (and the interfaces between), but are not confined to following:

– Implications of BRI for theories of the urban (see: Williams, Robinson and Bouzarovski, 2020)
– Decolonial, deimperialization and postcolonial implications of and approaches to BRI
– BRI and theories of diplomacy
– BRI and concepts of the international, global, worldwide and planetary
– BRI and cultural studies
– BRI and area studies
– BRI and understandings of empire, geopolitics and “civilization”
– BRI and the structure of modernity and futurity
– BRI, nature, ecology, the non-human/more-than-human and the Anthropocene (see: Barua, 2020)
– BRI and critical theorizations of infrastructure (see: Rodenbiker, 2020)
– BRI and critical theorizations of logistics, mobility, economy and finance (see: Lai, Lin and Sidaway, 2020)
– BRI and surveillance and security studies
– BRI and theorization of place, scale and volume
– BRI and implications for theories of sovereignty and territory
– BRI as method (cf. Chen, 2010)

Related to all of the above are questions concerning the geography of knowledge production. As Lin and Yang (2021, 2) note:

Future research on BRI needs to be increasingly attentive to the processes, and critical of the intentions, that underlie China’s production of knowledge. It is worth noting that while connectivity is foundational to the new Silk Road, academic outputs on BRI in China remain disconnected from scholarly outputs produced elsewhere. The different positions presented by China-based and non-China-based scholars must be considered in light of funding sources, political constraints over social science and humanities research, and the institutional surveillance in China over research outputs in both Chinese and English languages. Acknowledging and scrutinizing the politics of knowledge production in China has never been more important and relevant.

PANELLISTS

Professor Tim Bunnell
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

Dr Darren Byler
Center for Asian Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

Assoc Prof Chong Ja Ian
Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore

Professor Tim Oakes
Center for Asian Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

Assoc Prof Woon Chih Yuan
Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

Dr Yang Yang
Asia Research Institute, National University Singapore

CONVENORS

Dr Shaun Lin
Max Weber-NUS Research Fellow, National University of Singapore

Professor Naoko Shimazu
Asia Research Institute and Yale-NUS College

Professor James D Sidaway
Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

All three convenors are members of the Max Weber Foundation Research Group on Borders, Mobility and New Infrastructures established at NUS in June 2017.

REFERENCES
Barua N (2020) Nonhuman Life as Infrastructure. 
Chen K-H (2010) Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Rodenbiker J (2020) China’s Global Reach: Urban Social Lives of the More-than-Human. 
Lai KPY, Lin S and Sidaway JD (2020) Financing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): research agendas beyond the “debt-trap” discourse. Eurasian Geography and Economics 61(2): 109-124. 
Lin S and Yang Y (2021) ‘Introduction: Silk Roads and China’s production of knowledge’ in Lin et al. Review forum reading Tim Winter’s Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty-First Century. Political Geography 84, 102297. 
Sidaway JD, Rowedder SC, Woon CY, Lin W, Pholsena V (2020). Introduction: Research agendas raised by the Belt and Road Initiative. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. 38(5):795-802. 
Williams J, Robinson C, Bouzarovski S (2020) China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the emerging geographies of global urbanisation. Geographical Journal 186: 128– 140. 

REGISTRATION

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