The Programme

Besides regular and organised parallel sessions as usual, we plan to invite distinct keynote speakers from Europe, North America and Asia mainly with critical perspectives.

We plan several field trips to satisfy a variety of academic interests, including local day trips and overseas trips. Details will be announced later.

Opening and farewell receptions, lunches and coffee breaks will be provided on site and included in the conference fee, which would be approximately USD 600 for the delegates from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and equivalent countries/territories. Discounts will be offered for graduate students and delegates from non-OECD countries (with a few exceptions).

Featured Keynote Speakers

Eric Sheppard
(UCLA)

TITLE: Land Transformations Displacing Urban Majorities in Asian Cities

ABSTRACT: Reporting on a south-south comparative analysis of land transformations in Bangalore and Jakarta, this lecture will analyze how processes common to cities across the post-colony are shaped by spatio-temporal context. Such urban land transformations are dominated by ‘land grabs’, whereby the urban and peri-urban majority are displaced from lands they informally occupy in order to clear space for spectacular middle-class residential developments and infrastructure projects. These are driven by the assetization of land by global finance, the world-class urban aspirations of local political elites, the desires of the middle class for a western urban lifestyle, and developers leveraging substantial profits by mediating these forces. The research also examines the livelihood implications for those displaced, how the segregation of the middle class from the urban majority engenders negative attitudes toward the poor, and for the possibility and nature of urban informality as a more-than-capitalist alternative livelihood practice.

Wing-shing Tang
(Hong Kong Baptist University and The Chair, Hong Kong Critical Geography Group)

TOPIC (provisional): Developing a More East Asian Understanding

Sandro Mezzadra
(University of Bologna)

Professor Mezzadra is a leading scholar in the non-Anglophone academia in critical geography.. He is a co-author of the book Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor (Duke Univ. Press, 2013), which deals with the border explicitly with oppressed mobility of labour in contemporary capitalism.