13 JUN 2025 (FRI) 16:30-18:00

 Geography Distinguished Seminars Series

The New Hinterlands: Digital Connection, Suspension, and Precarity in Southeast Asia

Date: 13 JUN 2025 (Friday)

Time: 16:30-18:00 (HKT)

Mode: Hybrid

Venue: Chamber, Faculty of Social Science, 11/F, The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Via Zoom: Zoom link will be provided upon successful registration

Registration link: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=100527

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Abstract:

This presentation lays out a research agenda for examining the ways digital infrastructures are shaping rural-urban livelihood transitions within Southeast Asian spaces that are being rapidly integrated into global value chains. It proposes the innovative concept of ‘new hinterlands’ as a vehicle for rethinking the uneven socio-economic effects of increased digital connectivity. The concept indexes the spatial reconfigurations of uneven development that accompany the enrollment of formerly peripheral, peri-urban, and rural spaces into the fraught relationships of supply chain and extractive capitalism. This enrollment is enabled, especially, by new digital infrastructures and related logistical developments. The ‘new hinterlands’ thus function as fluid spaces of circulation, and this fundamentally shapes how livelihoods are forged by residents living there. Within these spaces meant to facilitate movement, the research therefore asks how connective infrastructures produce interstitial and contingent landscapes of settling. The presentation seeks to lay the theoretical groundwork for exploring this question, and draws on Thailand’s Eastern Economic Corridor as an illustrative case study.

Professor Timothy OAKES

Professor of Geography, University of Colorado, US

Tim Oakes is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. From 2012 to 2023 he was Director of the Colorado Center for Asian Studies, and from 2018 to 2023 he was Project Director of China Made, an international research collective focusing on China’s infrastructure-driven model of export development, funded by The Henry Luce Foundation. He has published extensively on the cultural and political effects of rural and urban development in China, cultural governance, tourism and heritage development, and most recently, infrastructural urbanism. Recent visiting faculty positions have included the National University of Singapore, University of Oslo, University of Hong Kong, Wageningen University, and Guizhou Minzu University. His current book project, forthcoming 2026, is Living in Nuclear Asia: Sociotechnical Perspectives on Nuclear Power Development, Risk, and Vulnerability (University of Toronto Press).

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