COVID-19 in Southeast Asia: Insights for a Post-Pandemic World

✍ Scribed by Hyun Bang Shin, Murray Mckenzie, Do Young Oh (eds.)

• Publisher: LSE Press
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 342
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

COVID-19 has presented huge challenges to governments, businesses, civil societies, and people from all walks of life, but its impact has been highly variegated, affecting society in multiple negative ways, with uneven geographical and socioeconomic patterns. The crisis revealed existing contradictions and inequalities in society, compelling us to question what it means to return to “normal” and what insights can be gleaned from Southeast Asia for thinking about a post-pandemic world.

In this regard, this edited volume collects the informed views of an ensemble of social scientists – area studies, development studies, and legal scholars; anthropologists, architects, economists, geographers, planners, sociologists, and urbanists; representing academic institutions, activist and charitable organisations, policy and research institutes, and areas of professional practice – who recognise the necessity of critical commentary and engaged scholarship.

These contributions represent a wide-ranging set of views, collectively producing a compilation of reflections on the following three themes in particular: (1) Urbanisation, digital infrastructures, economies, and the environment; (2) Migrants, (im)mobilities, and borders; and (3) Collective action, communities, and mutual action.

Overall, this edited volume first aims to speak from a situated position in relevant debates to challenge knowledge about the pandemic that has assigned selective and inequitable visibility to issues, people, or places, or which through its inferential or interpretive capacity has worked to set social expectations or assign validity to certain interventions with a bearing on the pandemic’s course and the future it has foretold. Second, it aims to advance or renew understandings of social challenges, risks, or inequities that were already in place, and which, without further or better action, are to be features of our “post-pandemic world” as well.

This volume also contributes to the ongoing efforts to de-centre and decolonise knowledge production. It endeavours to help secure a place within these debates for a region that was among the first outside of East Asia to be forced to contend with COVID-19 in a substantial way and which has evinced a marked and instructive diversity and dynamism in its fortunes.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Editors
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Insights for a post-pandemic world
Part I
Chapter 2. The urbanisation of spatial inequalities and a new model of urban development
Chapter 3. Digital transformation, education, and adult learning in Malaysia
Chapter 4. Data privacy, security, and the future of data governance in Malaysia
Chapter 5. Economic crisis and the panopticon of the digital virus in Cambodia
Chapter 6. Property development, capital growth, and housing affordability in Malaysia
Chapter 7. Business process outsourcing industry in the Philippines
Chapter 8. Global precarity chains and the economic impact on Cambodia’s garment workers
Chapter 9. The dual structure of Vietnam’s labour relations
Chapter 10. Southeast Asian haze and socio-environmental-epidemiological feedback
Part II
Chapter 11. Logistical virulence, migrant exposure
Chapter 12. The new normal, or the same old? The experiences of domestic workers in Singapore
Chapter 13. Questioning the ‘hero’s welcome’ for repatriated overseas Filipino workers
Chapter 14. Exposing the transnational precarity of Filipino workers, healthcare regimes
Chapter 15. The economic case against the marginalisation of migrant workers in Malaysia
Chapter 16. Emergent bordering tactics, logics of injustice
Chapter 17. The impacts of crisis on the conflict-prone Myanmar-China borderland
Part III
Chapter 18. Rethinking urbanisation, development, and collective action in Indonesia
Chapter 19. Community struggles and the challenges of solidarity in Myanmar
Chapter 20. Gotong royong and the role of community in Indonesia
Chapter 21. Rewriting food insecurity narratives in Singapore
Chapter 22. Happiness-sharing pantries and the ‘easing of hunger for the needy’ in Thailand
Chapter 23. Being-in-common and food relief networks in Metro Manila, the Philippines
Chapter 24. Community responses to gendered issues in Malaysia
Chapter 25. Building rainbow community resilience among the queer community in Southeast Asia
Chapter 26. Postscript: in-pandemic academia, scholarly practices, and an ethics of care
Index

✦ Subjects

Economy; Urbanization; Migrants; Mobilities; Communities; Southeast Asia; COVID-19