As part of LSE Southeast Asia Week 2020, SEAC, in collaboration with ASEAS UK, hosted a roundtable panel discussion, chaired by SEAC Director Prof. Hyun Bang Shin on 28th October 2020. The event invited selected directors of global centres on Southeast Asia to discuss the future of  Southeast Asian Studies and challenges in the midst of COVID-19 generated ‘new normal’.

Video

A video of this event is available to watch at Facebook.

• Prof Tim Bunnell is Director of the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore, where he is also Professor in the Department of Geography. His research interests concern human geographies of urban and regional change, including examination of the transformation of urban regions (cities and wider urban territories), and the lives and aspirations of people in those territories. Empirically, he focuses on Southeast Asia – working mostly on cities in Malaysia and Indonesia – and on interurban connections between that region and elsewhere. Prof Bunnell also has a longstanding interest in the place of urbanizing Asia in global urban studies. Having previously led the Asian Urbanisms cluster at ARI, he is currently research leader of the institute’s cluster on Inter-Asia Engagements.
• Prof Michele Ford is Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre. Her research focuses on trade union aid, Southeast Asian labour movements and labour migration. Prof Ford’s work has been supported by a number of Australian Research Council Discovery Project grants related to these and other topics. She has also been involved in extensive consultancy work for the ILO, the international labour movement and the Australian government. Prof Ford also has a strong record of disciplinary service. In addition to sitting on the ARC College of Experts from 2015 to 2017, she has served as Secretary of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, President of the Indonesia Council, NSW representative on the ACICIS Reference Group and the University of Sydney representative on the Australian Universities Governing Committee of the Aceh Research Training Institute. She is currently President of the International Sociological Association’s RC44 and continues to sit on the Advisory Board of the ANU’s Indonesia Project Advisory Board, the International Advisory Board of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, the International Advisory Board of the Global Asia Research Center at National Taiwan University and the International Advisory Board of the Cambodia Development Research Institute.
• Prof Duncan McCargo is Director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. In his previous position at the University of Leeds, Duncan twice headed one of Britain’s largest politics departments, and co-supervised 29 PhD students to successful completion. Between 2015 and 2019, he also held a shared professorial appointment with the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, teaching alternate semesters in New York and Yorkshire. He works at the intersections of comparative and international politics, with a focus on the nature of power. His dozen books include the award-winning Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand (Cornell 2008), and Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand (Cornell 2019). Duncan’s latest book is Future Forward: The Rise and Fall of a Thai Political Party (with Anyarat Chattharakul, NIAS Press, 2020), for which he received an Undergraduate Research Fellowship funded by LSE’s Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre.
• Prof Marina Svensson is Director of the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University, Sweden. Prof Svensson's research focuses on a range of different topics related to contemporary Chinese society. She has received research grants from the major national research bodies such as the Swedish Research Council, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, and Sida (the Swedish International Development Agency). She has been project leader for a number of different interdisciplinary research projects, for example on Chinese law, investigative journalism in China, and China’s digital society. She has organised many international conferences and has also arranged a number of documentary film festivals. Marina has served as an external reviewer of articles to academic journals such as China Quarterly, China Information, China Journal, China Review, Journal of International Communication, Asian Journal of Communication, Journalism: Theory, practice and criticism, Postcolonial Studies, Governance, Law and Society Review, and Journal of Comparative Politics among others. She is a member of the editorial advisory board to the Chinese Journal of Communication and to Media, Culture and Society. She has served on the board of the European Association of Chinese Studies and was the initiator to and board member of the European China Law Studies Association.
• Prof Mark R. Thompson is Head and Professor of Politics, Department of Asian and International Studies and Director, Southeast Asia Research Centre (SEARC) at the City University of Hong Kong. He is president of the Hong Kong Political Science Association and past president of the Asian Political and International Studies Association. He previously taught in the UK (Glasgow University) and Germany (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Dresden University of Technology, the Munich Federal Army University, and the University of Muenster). He has held several visiting positions, including at Keio University, the University for Peace, De la Salle University, and Thammasat University. He was Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Fellow for Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore and Stanford University. He completed his PhD in political science at Yale University where he was a student of Juan Linz and James Scott. He has received several major external grants, most recently one funded by the Hong Kong General Research Fund on illiberal populism in the Philippines. The author or editor of 10 books and over 100 articles and chapters, his research focuses on democratisation, autocratisation, and leadership. 
• Prof Hyun Bang Shin is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies in the Department of Geography and Environment and Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economic dynamics of speculative urbanisation, the politics of redevelopment and displacement, gentrification, housing, the right to the city, and mega-events as urban spectacles, with particular attention to cities in Asian countries such as South Korea, China, Vietnam and Singapore. His recent projects on ‘circulating urbanism and (Asian) capital’ have also brought him to work on Quito, Manila, Iskandar Malaysia, Kuwait City and London. Prof Shin has published widely in major international journals and contributed to numerous books on the above themes. He has coauthored Planetary Gentrification (Polity, 2016), edited Anti-Gentrification: What Is to Be Done (Dongnyok, 2017),and co- edited Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement (Bristol University Press, 2015) and Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). He is a board member (trustee) of the Urban Studies Foundation, and sits on the international advisory board of the journal Antipode as well as on the editorial board of the journals International Journal of Urban and Regional Research; Urban Geography; CITY; City, Culture and Society; Space and Environment [in Korea]; China City Planning Review [in China].