Notes on Contributors
Noorman Abdullah
is Assistant Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and holds a joint-appointment as Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, together with Malay Studies, National University of Singapore. His core research interests focus primarily on religion and society; deviance and social control; and sensory studies, with a strong empirical component grounded on ethnography, everyday life and qualitative fieldwork. His publications have appeared in journals such as American Behavioral Scientist, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies and Asian Journal of Social Sciences.
Ahmad Arif
is a researcher and senior journalist with Kompas (Indonesia), and has formative training in Architecture and Sociology. His work focuses on the reporting of science, disasters and other environmental issues. He is currently Chair of the Indonesian Disaster and Crisis Journalist Association, and the co-founder of Laporcovid19.org. He is the author of Jurnalisme Bencana, Bencana Jurnalisme (Disaster Journalism; Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia, 2010) and Hidup Mati di Negeri Cincin Api (Life and Death in the Ring of Fire; Penerbit Buku Kompas, 2013).
Remmon E. Barbaza
is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines. He holds a BA in Linguistics from the University of the Philippines, and MA in Philosophy from the Ateneo de Manila University, and a PhD in Philosophy from the Munich School of Philosophy. His research interests include Heidegger, technology, language, and the city. He edited the book, Making Sense of the City: Public Spaces in the Philippines (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2019).
Anna-Katharina Hornidge
is Director of the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), formerly the Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik/DIE, and Professor for Global Sustainable Development at the University of Bonn. She works on knowledges and innovation for international development, as well as questions on natural resources governance in agriculture and fisheries in Asia and Africa. She is co-editor of multiple books including The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (Routledge, 2018). She also serves as expert advisor at national, EU and UN levels, as Member of the German Advisory Council on Global Change of the German Government (WBGU), Co-Chair of SDSN Germany, and as part of the executive council of the German UNESCO-Commission.
Magne Knudsen
is Assistant Professor and Programme Leader of Sociology and Anthropology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD). His research broadly focuses on livelihood transition, land tenure and resource conflicts in coastal and upland regions of Southeast Asia. Magne holds a PhD (2010) in Social Anthropology from the Australian National University. Before coming to UBD in 2015, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the National University of Singapore.
Yvonne Kunz
is a human geographer by training, and presently a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden. Her current work in the interdisciplinary project “Climate Change and Governance in Indonesia and the Caribbean” engages explicitly with Marine Protected Areas. Kunz was previously a senior researcher at the German Development Institute (DIE) in the context of the German Advisory Council on Global Change. Her past work spans questions of access and power asymmetries in human-environment relations. Natural resource regulation for land, air and water, mainly in Indonesia and the Philippines have been the focus of her work.
Loh Kah Seng
is a historian of Singapore and Director of Chronicles Research and Education Pte Ltd. He is interested in all things that happened in the history of a city and the lives of its people. His books include Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore (NUS Press, 2013); Tuberculosis – The Singapore Experience, 1867–2018: Disease, Society and the State (Routledge, 2020); and Theatres of Memory: Industrial Heritage of 20th Century Singapore (Pagesetters, 2021). He is currently writing about pandemics in Singapore history.
Kelvin E. Y. Low
is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. His main research interests include sensory studies, migration and transnationalism, social memory, and food and foodways. He is author or editor of four books with the most recent being Senses in Cities: Experiences of Urban Settings (Routledge, 2017). Other publications have appeared in such journals as The Sociological Review, Pacific Affairs, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Ethnography, among others.
Michael D. Pante
is Associate Professor at the Department of History, Ateneo de Manila University, and chief editor of Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints. He is the author of A Capital City at the Margins: Quezon City and Urbanization in the Twentieth-Century Philippines (Ateneo de Manila University Press; Kyoto University Press, 2019). His other works on urban and environmental history have appeared in City & Society, Nature and Culture, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and Journal of Social History.
Irina Rafliana
is a doctoral candidate at the German Development Institute (DIE) and the University of Bonn. Her DAAD-funded doctoral work explores social constructions of technology in the making of Indonesia’s Tsunami Early Warning System. With her home institution BRIN (National Agency for Research and Innovation) Indonesia, she has been working on tsunami and disaster risk reduction-related issues since 2005. She is a member of the Indonesian Social Science Panel of Disasters, and was a former member of the Global Science and Technology Advisory Group for Disaster Risk Reduction to the United Nations Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction.
Jalaludin bin Salleh
started his career as a commercial diver taking on varied assignments across Southeast Asia for over 11 years, before continuing his studies. Trained in social work practice, he spent 18 years as a community-based youth worker, and latterly as a school counsellor. He presently owns a hawker stall while living in close proximity to the sea on Singapore’s East Coast. As a descendant of Bugis Bintan fourth-generation seafarers and ship captains, the sea interminably remains a part of his identity.
Isabelle Simpson
obtained her PhD from the Department of Geography at McGill University, Canada, for which she won FRQSC and SSHRC doctoral scholarships, a Wolfe Fellowship in Science and Technology Literacy, and multiple research awards. Her research examines projects to develop ‘start-up societies’ as private cities developed and governed by conservative and libertarian entrepreneurs, and how they engage with emerging technologies such as blockchain and cryptocurrency. Her research contributes to urban, science and technology, and elite studies and critically addresses issues around who shapes urban futures and how.
Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa
is Senior Scientist at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (Germany), with a background in environmental anthropology and cultural geography. Her work examines littoral lifeworlds, decolonial island relations, and speculative infrastructural futures while drawing on mobile, multimodal ethnographic approaches. She is author of Fishing, Mobility and Settlerhood: Coastal Socialities in Postwar Sri Lanka (Springer, 2018), and is co-editor of the anthology Rebel Wom!n: Words, Ways, and Wonders (DIO Press, 2022).
Matthew Wade
is a researcher who studies Southeast Asian cities, climate change, and government. His previous work shows how Jakarta was transformed in the decades since the early 1990s by a nascent finance economy and booming real estate industry, which dotted the urban landscape with mega-developments and reshaped modern life in the city. He began researching in Jakarta in 2013, spent a year in the city conducting in-depth anthropological research in 2014–2015, and stayed in touch through follow-up trips and ongoing communication with informants.