Maria Carinnes P. Alejandria
is an anthropologist specializing in disaster governance and health justice in Southeast Asia. She is an assistant professor and the Programme Coordinator of the Sociology and Anthropology Programme at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam. She held fellowship positions with Brown University and Loughborough University for her work on disaster studies and human rights. Her publications include the edited volumes Disaster Archipelago: Locating Vulnerability and Resilience in the Philippines and Aging in the Global South: Challenges and Opportunities. She has also authored journal articles and edited special issues addressing complex disasters, humanitarian coordination, and social health.
David Arnold
is a historian of modern South Asia and a Fellow of the British Academy. Formerly Professor of Asian and Global History at the University of Warwick, he has written extensively on the history of medicine, science, technology and environment. Published work includes Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (1993); The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion (1996); The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856 (2006); Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity (2013) and Toxic Histories: Poison and Pollution in Modern India (2016).
Paul J. Carnegie
is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. His interests focus on the politics of development, state formation, marginality, and precarity in Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia. He is the author of The Road from Authoritarianism to Democratization in Indonesia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and co-edited Human Insecurities in Southeast Asia (Springer, 2016) and (Re)Presenting Brunei Darussalam: A Sociology of the Everyday (Springer, 2023). He is also a section editor for the Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity and sits on the editorial board of the IAS-Springer, Asia in Transition Series. His research articles have appeared in leading journals such as Pacific Affairs, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Journal of Population Research and Australian Journal of International Affairs.
is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Science and Development, Chiang Mai University. His research interests are in security studies, hydropolitics in the Mekong Basin and transdisciplinarity. His articles have appeared in leading international journals including Asian Survey, Asian International Studies Review, Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs and Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Water. His current research project focuses on Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Myanmar.
Rommel A. Curaming
is a senior assistant professor at the History and International Studies Programme at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD). He obtained a PhD at the Australian National University (ANU) and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at La Trobe University and the National University of Singapore (NUS). The empirical and thematic areas of his research focus on the analysis of the politics of the (supposedly) non-political, particularly historical knowledge production, consumption and distribution in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. His book Power and Knowledge in Southeast Asia was published by Routledge (2020).
Maya Dania
is an assistant professor of Sociology at the School of Social Innovation, Mae Fah Luang University. Her research integrates the Anthropocene and Posthumanism into environmental sustainability, addressing critical social and environmental challenges in Southeast Asia. She is a Fellow of the UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF) and a UNESCO Chair-Kobe University Fellow on Gender, Vulnerability and Well-Being in Disaster Risk Reduction. She has received several prestigious grants, including funding from the Sumitomo Foundation, and has published extensively in leading academic outlets such as Springer and Brill. Additionally, she is a core member of the Disaster Resilience and Environmental Sustainability Research Program (DRES-ARCID) at Mae Fah Luang University.
Heather Downey
is a social work academic at La Trobe University’s Albury-Wodonga campus in Victoria, Australia. Her research concerns social and environmental justice in the rural context. As a regional academic, her interest lies in the economic, social, cultural, recreational, and environmental meaning of water for all rural residents. She is currently collaborating with multidisciplinary researchers in the Murray Darling Water and Environment Research Program to explore how
Rohan D’Souza
is an environmental historian specializing in South Asia, with research interests in colonial water governance, technological transformations, and ecological change. He is based at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies, Kyoto University. His works include Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India, and numerous articles on the political ecology of rivers. His scholarship critically examines the intersections of colonialism, capitalism, and environmental change. He has also contributed to debates on the Anthropocene and environmental futures, positioning his work within global environmental history and political ecology frameworks.
Sk. Tawfique M. Haque
is a professor of Public Policy and Governance and Director of the South Asian Institute of Policy and Governance (SIPG) at North South University (NSU), Bangladesh. His research interests include migration, Rohingya crisis, organizational culture, local governance, globalization, international trade regime, development management, geopolitics, and climate change. He has authored seven books, and fourteen book chapters from leading international publishing presses, including Springer, Routledge, Ashgate, Palgrave Macmillan, in addition to several articles in nationally and internationally indexed journals. His most recent book, The Displaced Rohingyas: A Tale of a Vulnerable Community, was published by Routledge in 2024. He serves as member of the editorial board of South East Asia: A Multidisciplinary Journal (SEAMJ).
Mohammad Tareq Hasan
is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Dhaka (DU), Bangladesh. After the initial training in Anthropology from DU, he pursued MPhil in Anthropology of Development (2014) and PhD in Social Anthropology (2018) from the University of Bergen (UiB), Norway. He also completed a postdoctoral research fellowship (2021) at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden University, the Netherlands. Besides teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels, his research revolves around anthropology of work, state formation, political economy, and egalitarianism. His recently authored book is “Everyday Life of Ready-made Garment Kormi in Bangladesh: An Ethnography of Neoliberalism” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
is a senior assistant professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. She was previously a Postdoctoral Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Geography at King’s College London and a Visiting Scholar at the East West Centre, Hawaii. Her research falls under the umbrella of urban landscape and consumption, where her research interests include retail and consumption dynamics; housing development; landscape studies and tourism; sustainable development and welfare. She is the Head of Borneo Studies Network Secretariat Office, UBD and a Research Associate at the Institute of Asian Studies, UBD.
Iftekhar Iqbal
is a historian at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, where he serves as an associate professor and programme leader for the History and International Studies Programme. His research interests lie in environmental humanities and intellectual history, and his works include The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State and Social Change, 1840–1943 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and The Range of the River: A Riverine History of Empire across China, India, and Southeast Asia (Stanford University Press, 2025). He is currently working on a book project, “Anthropocene South Asia: A Short History.” Iqbal is an editorial board member with South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and Conservation and Society. At UBD, he leads the research cluster “The Environment and Transformations.”
Andrew Alan Johnson
PhD, is Associate Professor at Stockholm University and a writer at Firaxis Games since 2020. He was previously Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley (2019–2022), and held faculty positions at Princeton, Yale-NUS College, and postdoctoral fellowships at Columbia and the National University of Singapore. He earned his PhD in Anthropology from Cornell University in 2010. His research explores how people rebuild life amid economic and environmental crises. He is the author of Ghosts of the New City (2014), on urban decay in Chiang Mai, and Mekong Dreaming (2020), which examines the transformations wrought by dams on the Mekong river. He has also published widely in journals and edited volumes.
Magne Knudsen
is an anthropologist specializing in environmental anthropology and political ecology, with a focus on livelihood transitions in fishing and farming communities across Southeast Asia. Since his doctoral project in social anthropology at the Australian National University in 2010, his work has spanned studies of fishing families’ livelihood challenges and land rights, disaster response,
Asiyah Kumpoh
(PhD, Leicester), is a senior assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. Her current research and publications focus on Brunei’s history, conversion narratives, the Brunei Dusuns, and diasporas in Brunei. Recent publications include “Exclusion and Inclusion: Melayu Islam Beraja in Bruneian Nationalism and National Identity,” [pp. 549–560] (co-authored with Nani Suryani Abu Bakar) in the Routledge Handbook of Nationalism in East and Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2023) and “Can Cultural Homogenization be an Open-Ended Process? Reconstructing the Narratives of Brunei’s Homogenization Process” in the Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies, 10, 2 (2023).
David Ludden
is an emeritus professor of Political Economy and Globalization at the Department of History at New York University. He has held the position of Senior Fellow at the Institute of Public Knowledge; Chairman of History Department at NYU; Fulbright Fellow; Fellow at the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fund; and a member of American Council of Learned Societies. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. He was the President of Association for Asian Studies (2002–3). He has published more than 10 books and more than 65 articles and book chapters. He is currently working on a monograph: Global Asia: A Spatial History. His major monographs and edited volumes include: India and South Asia: A Short History (Oxford 2002); Peasant History in South India (Oxford, 1985, 2005); An Agrarian History of South Asia (Cambridge, 1999); Capitalism in South Asia (Association for Asian Studies, 2004) and Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India (Philadelphia, 1996).
Misa Juliana Minggu
holds an undergraduate degree in Sociology and Anthropology. A young scholar from the Iban community of Temburong, she has worked as a research assistant on several projects on indigenous cultures and ecological knowledge on Borneo.
is a senior assistant professor in the English Studies programme at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. Her research focuses on the intersections of popular fiction, Bruneian fiction, and representations of religion in literature. Her work has appeared in several edited volumes published by Routledge and Springer, as well as in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and World Englishes. Most recently she co-edited The Literature of Brunei: History, Culture and Challenges with Ooi Keat Gin, Routledge 2025.
Izni Azrein bin Noor Azalie
teaches at the University of Brunei Darussalam’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. He earned his BA Hons Major in Geography and Minor in History at Universiti Brunei Darussalam. At Loughborough University in the UK, he received his Master of Science (MSc) in Global Transformations. After obtaining his PhD in Development Policy from University College London (UCL), his research interests now focus more on halal industrial governance and economic growth, urban economies and development, and how human-environmental dynamics affect communities and nature. His other research interests also cover environmental monitoring and assessment; globalisation; sustainable development; creative cities and urban planning; issues and politics of development, and geopolitics.
John Charles Ryan
is a researcher in literary studies, creative writing, and environmental humanities. He is Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Nulungu Research Institute, University of Notre Dame, Australia, and Visiting Researcher at the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, Finland. Funded by the Kone Foundation, his current project examines possibilities for communication and collaboration between people and trees in Northern Finland. His books include Environment, Media and Popular Culture in Southeast Asia (2022, Springer, co-edited) and Introduction to the Environmental Humanities (2022, Routledge, co-authored). He is the Chief Editor of the journal Plant Perspectives and Managing Co-Editor of The Trumpeter. For more information, see www.johncharlesryan.com.
Md Mamunur Rashid
(PhD, Universiti Brunei Darussalam) is a professor of History at Jagannath University, Dhaka. His research interests include, among other areas, historical relations between the economy and environment in South and Southeast Asia. In addition to publishing in several leading journals, Rashid is currently working on a book project that explores the tripartite relationship between economy, transport, and ecology in colonial Bengal Delta and northern Borneo.
is a professor of Geography at the Graduate School of Literature and Human Sciences, Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan. He has conducted extensive field research in Malaysia, Japan, and other Asian countries, focusing on human-nature interactions and the environmental humanities. His recent research interests include the expansion of oil palm smallholdings in Southeast Asia and the politics surrounding dam construction in East Asia. His notable publications include: People on the Move: Rural-Urban Interactions in Sarawak (2007); “The Diversity of Small-Scale Oil Palm Cultivation in Sarawak, Malaysia,” The Geographical Journal, 182 (2015) and Anthropogenic Tropical Forest: Human-Nature Interfaces on the Plantation Frontier (2020).
Willem van Schendel
(University of Amsterdam and International Institute of Asian Studies) works in the fields of history, sociology and anthropology of Asia. He served as Professor of Comparative History and then as Professor of Modern Asian History. Recent books include Entangled Lives: Human-Animal-Plant Histories of the Eastern Himalayan Triangle (2022, with J. Pachuau); Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces: Histories of Networking and Border Crossing (2022, ed. with G. Cederlöf); A History of Bangladesh (2015); The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India (2015, with J. Pachuau) and The Bangladesh Reader: History, Culture, Politics (2013, ed. with M. Guhathakurta). For more publications, see uva.academia.edu/WillemVanSchendel.
Gabriel Yong
is a lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Universiti Brunei Darussalam. Currently, he is the programme leader for Geography and Environmental Studies. His research interests include sustainability issues from a complex living systems perspective; human-environment evolution in Brunei & Brunei Bay; Arcology; heritage conservation, focusing on Kampong Ayer; data capture methodologies in an information-rich but noisy environment; and learning & knowledge development through experiential, project/field-based dialectic learning & use of social networks.
Md. Parvez Hasan Yousuf
is a research associate at the South Asian Institute of Policy and Governance (SIPG), North South University, Bangladesh. Trained in Disaster and Human Security Management at the Bangladesh University of Professionals (BUP), his interest lies in disaster management, environment, climate change, rivers, refugee crisis, displacement, human security, public policy, and governance. His work on the social cohesion of the host and Rohingya communities in