This Southeast Asia Forum event showcased some of the on-going work of PhD researchers at LSE, whose work covers society and economy in Southeast Asia. Featured researchers came from the Departments of Anthropology, Economic History, and Geography and Environment, discussing lifelong journeys of self-transformation amongst Catholic nuns in Indonesia, the financing of the Manila Trade (1668-1828), and the experience of ride-hailing drivers during the Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia
Moving Hearts: Becoming a Nun in Eastern Indonesia
Meghan Rose Donnelly
Eastern Indonesian Catholic nuns undergo a lifelong process of self-becoming as they transform from ‘village’ girls into cosmopolitan subjects and icons of religious authority. Regularly reassigned to convents in different regions of the world, encouraged to adapt to diverse communities, and tasked with bearing divine joy to others, women learn that the path to becoming a nun requires strong self-knowledge and a powerful reckoning with the heart. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in their convents, this talk introduces some of the techniques and consequences of their lifelong journeys of self-transformation.
How was the Manila Trade financed? An alternative institutional approach to Early Modern long-distance trade financing, 1668-1828
Juan Jose Rivas Moreno
For over 250 years (1565-1821), a transpacific line of trade connected East and South Asia with Spanish America through the city of Manila. This trade was large in volume, and persistent in time, yet almost nothing is known about the intricacies of its financing. By using primary sources, this thesis reconstructs the capital markets of the city of Manila during the long-Eighteenth century, exposing a financial and institutional system that differed in many ways from the accepted standard models for Early Modern trade-fuelled economic growth.
Ride-hailing drivers experience during the Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia
Yorga Permana
Using a representative survey of ride-hailing drivers in Jakarta, this research explores their working attitudes, earnings, and well-being during the time of pandemic while working in the gig economy platform.
A video recording of this event is available here.
Speaker and Chair Biographies
Meghan Rose Donnelly is an LSE PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology.
Juan Jose Rivas Moreno is an LSE PhD Candidate in the Department of Economic History.
Yorga Permana is an LSE PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography and Environment.
Prof. Hyun Bang Shin (@urbancommune) is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of speculative urbanisation, gentrification and displacement, urban spectacles, and urbanism with particular attention to Asian cities. His books include Planetary Gentrification (Polity, 2016), Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience (Routledge, 2021), and The Political Economy of Mega Projects in Asia: Globalization and Urban Transformation (Routledge, forthcoming). He is Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation.