240122 VO+UE VM6 / VM3 - Space, Mobility and Inequality in Southeast Asia (2021S)

The course addresses various spatial dimensions of current social phenomena in Southeast Asia, a region characterized by striking inequalities, economic diversity and cultural plurality. A number of societal dynamics and transformation processes, often subsumed under development, will be discussed and analysed throughout the course, trying to understand development, and development research, from different disciplinary perspectives as well as from different regional angles. Development studies are primarily concerned with the study of regional differences leading to global inequalities, with geographical distribution of chances and freedoms, with movement and mobility of people, goods and ideas, with restructuring of scales as expressions of changing hierarchies of power. We will discuss how the spatial turn makes us turn to relationality, interdependence and simultaneity in social science research. We will see how space, place and locality can be valuable methodological and analytical lenses to study complex and dynamic societal phenomena. We will discuss how areas, regions and territories are constructed and how their historicity is ingrained in their symbolic and political meaning. We will further identify distinct politics of scale and the changing hierarchies of power, particularly in the related process of centralised and peripheralized locations. And we will try to understand how scientists and researchers, particularly in development and area studies, can navigate the structures of time and space as useful perspectives in grasping and understanding structural inequalities. The following topics will be covered:
1. Geography of Development in Southeast Asia
2. “The Urban-Rural nexus”
3. Food Security and Agrarian Change
4. Dispossession, Displacement and Land Conflicts
5. Transnational Migration
6. Gender, Care and Labour Division
7. Environmental Transborder Justice