COVID-19 has presented huge challenges to governments, businesses, civil societies, and people from all walks of life, but its impact has been highly variegated, affecting society in multiple negative ways, with uneven geographical and socioeconomic patterns. The crisis revealed existing contradictions and inequalities in society, compelling us to question what it means to return to "normal" and what insights can be gleaned from Southeast Asia for thinking about a post-pandemic world.
In this regard, this edited volume collects the informed views of an ensemble of social scientists - area studies, development studies, and legal scholars; anthropologists, architects, economists, geographers, planners, sociologists, and urbanists; representing academic institutions, activist and charitable organisations, policy and research institutes, and areas of professional practice - who recognise the necessity of critical commentary and engaged scholarship.
These contributions represent a wide-ranging set of views, collectively producing a compilation of reflections on the following three themes in particular: (1) Urbanisation, digital infrastructures, economies, and the environment; (2) Migrants, (im)mobilities, and borders; and (3) Collective action, communities, and mutual action.
Overall, this edited volume first aims to speak from a situated position in relevant debates to challenge knowledge about the pandemic that has assigned selective and inequitable visibility to issues, people, or places, or which through its inferential or interpretive capacity has worked to set social expectations or assign validity to certain interventions with a bearing on the pandemic's course and the future it has foretold. Second, it aims to advance or renew understandings of social challenges, risks, or inequities that were already in place, and which, without further or better action, are to be features of our "post-pandemic world" as well.
This volume also contributes to the ongoing efforts to de-centre and decolonise knowledge production. It endeavours to help secure a place within these debates for a region that was among the first outside of East Asia to be forced to contend with COVID-19 in a substantial way and which has evinced a marked and instructive diversity and dynamism in its fortunes.
Author Biography:
Hyun Bang Shin 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 urbanisation, gentrification, displacement, urban spectacles, and urbanism, with particular attention to Asian cities. He is a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation and an editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. ORCiD: https: //orcid.org/0000-0002-1103-9221 Murray Mckenzie is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant and Research Officer at the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and a strategic planning consultant. He holds a PhD in Geography and Urban Studies from UCL and an MA in Community and Regional Planning from the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the roles of the arts, culture, and their contestation in processes of urban growth and change. Do Young Oh is a Research Assistant Professor at the School of Graduate Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He was previously a Research Officer, based jointly at the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre and the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he completed his PhD in Regional and Urban Planning. His research interests focus on comparative urbanism and postcolonialism in East Asia. ORCiD: https: //orcid.org/0000-0001-5659-351X
