Co-hosted with the LSE Department of Geography and Environment.

On 30th January 2020, Professor Jonathan Rigg (Chair in Human Geography at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol) will give a public lecture  on the different, but intertwined, narratives that paint Southeast Asia as exemplar of development success yet with deepening inequality. The lecture will be chaired by SEAC Director Prof Hyun Bang Shin. 

Southeast Asia’s growth story since the 1960s is as impressive as it is well known. The region has become an exemplar of development success reflected in such epithets as ‘miracle’, ‘tiger’ and ‘dragon’. There has always, however, been an accompanying alternative narrative, one that does not receive the same level of exposure: of deepening inequality, development injustice, environmental crisis, and social malaise. In this lecture, Prof. Rigg will argue that these two views, while notably different, are closely intertwined. And if we are to understand why the region’s development challenge has not dissolved with growth, we need to pay attention to and understand these links.

 Speaker's bios

Professor Jonathan Rigg holds a professorship in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol in the UK. Until this year, he was Director of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on agrarian conditions and transformations in Asia, and since the early 1980s he has conducted fieldwork in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Nepal.  Over more than 30 years, he has worked on rice variety selection strategy, rural livelihoods, rural-urban relations, migration and mobility, disaster preparedness, and climate change resilience. In 2019 he published three books that reflect his interests: More than rural: textures of Thailand’s agrarian transformation (Hawaii University Press); People and Climate Change: Vulnerability, Adaptation, and Social Justice (edited with Lisa Reyes Mason) (Oxford University Press); and The Asian smallholder: transformation and persistence (edited with Eric Thompson and Jamie Gillen) (Amsterdam University Press).

This event relates to SEAC's #connectivity theme.

Listen to the talk here