Following Dr Seb Rumsby's recently published monograph, this panel will discuss and debate the contributions of Development in Spirit to understanding the possibilities for 'alternative routes to development' or empowerment amidst profound socio-economic transformations in contemporary rural Southeast Asia. Seb will be joined by professor Catherine Allerton and Dr Hans Steinmuller to explore the marketisation of upland livelihoods, the under-appreciated role of religion in everyday politics and the influence of neoliberal governance in everyday lives.
This event was recorded and the video can be watched here
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Dr Seb Rumsby is an interdisciplinary scholar with a wide range of interests including everyday politics, labour exploitation, undocumented migration, ethno-religious politics, grassroots development and non-national histories. Seb unites these diverse themes with an empirical focus on Southeast Asian worlds and people. He completed his PhD at University of Warwick in 2020, before lecturing in Southeast Asian Politics and Queen Mary University of London. He is now a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at University of Birmingham.
Professor Catherine Allerton is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, LSE, and is a specialist in the anthropology of island Southeast Asia, with research interests in children and childhoods, migration, kinship, place and landscape. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in a two-placed village in Flores, Indonesia and in the capital city of Sabah, East Malaysia. Her current research explores experiences of exclusion, belonging and potential statelessness amongst the children of Indonesian and Filipino refugees and migrants in Sabah, East Malaysia.
Dr Hans Steinmüller is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, LSE and a specialist in the anthropology of China. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Hubei Province (central China) and in the Wa hills of the China-Myanmar border. Publications include the monograph Communities of Complicity (Berghahn 2013), and more recently special issues on Governing Opacity (Ethnos 2023) and Crises of Care in China Today (China Quarterly 2023). He is editor of Social Analysis and convenor of the MSc programme 'China in Comparative Perspective'.