This panel discussion Chaired by SEAC Director Prof. Hyun Bang Shin was an interdisciplinary conversation on the potential of building itineraries of collaborative thinking between Southern contexts, going beyond constraints incurred by Western mediation. Recent developments in the social sciences have pointed towards the need to move beyond the domination of the ‘West’ in knowledge production.

This panel brought together scholars from Latin America and Southeast Asia whose research is rooted in such effort of theorizing “from the South”, addressing the structural power inequalities of knowledge production that tend to exclude the contributions produced by scholars working "in the South", which are often ignored or lost in translation. While establishing dialogues between regions and across different fields, it emphasised such lost contributions with the aim of exploring potential alternative routes for mutual learning.

The panel was part of the Decolonising the LSE Week, an event that brought together multiple conversations across the LSE and beyond on the challenges of decolonising global higher education.

 Download and listen to the podcast here

The schedule for the event was as follows:

16.30-16.40: Chair’s Welcome Introduction

• Hyun Bang Shin, Professor of Geography and Urban Studies and Director of Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, LSE

16.40-17.00: Reflections on Southeast Asia 

• Miss Tin Alvarez (PhD Candiate, UCL)
  "The South of the Global South: Knowledge production in post-colonial urban studies"
• Dr May Ngo (Research Fellow,  Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Science) 
  "Inter-Asian referencing and Asia as method: concepts and new possibilities for a study of contemporary Asia"

17.00-17.20: Reflections on Latin America

• Dr Audrey Alejandro (Assistant Professor, Department of Methodology, LSE)
  "Global dialogue without a centre? Navigating pitfalls and opportunities"
• Dr Mara Nogueira (Fellow in Human Geography, LSE)
  “Beyond the formal/informal binary: contributions from Latin American scholars”

17.20-17.30: Refreshment Break

17.30-17.55: Panel Q&A

Speakers' bios:

• Miss Tin Alvarez is the recipient of the 2018 Gilbert F. White Thesis Award (Master’s) given by the Hazards, Risks, and Disasters Specialty Group (HRDSG) of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), and the 2018 DPU60 Doctoral Scholarship Award from The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London. Her PhD research aims to understand how ‘danger zone’ evictions, as both requirement and consequence of resilience seeking in post-Ondoy (2009-present) Metro Manila, spatially reorganise the metropolitan region and its peri-urban fringe.
• Dr May Ngo is a Research Fellow at the Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Science. Her research interests in the Southeast Asia region comprise: religion and development in Cambodia, the impact of colonialism and the Cold War on Cambodia, and ethnographic practice and theory.
• Dr Audrey Alejandro is Assistant Professor in the Department of Methodology at the LSE. Previously, she was a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London, and a Fellow at the London School of Economics and at Sciences Bordeaux where she received her PhD in Political Science in 2015. She also held visiting positions at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, and at the Instituto de Relações Internacionais, University of São Paulo, Brazil.
• Dr Mara Nogueira is an urban geographer whose research focuses on socio-spatial inequality and the urban politics of urban space production in Brazil. She completed a PhD in Human Geography and Urban Studies at LSE. Further, she holds a BSc and an MSc in Economics from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. She has experience in teaching and lecturing, while also having a number of papers published in Urban Geography and Regional Economics.