Last 2019 October 1, I gave a talk at the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre’s event for “Decolonising the LSE Week”. The podcast for our panel, “South-South itineraries: alternative routes for mutual learning between Latin America and Southeast Asia”, is available to download and stream at this link.

My talk reflected on the lack of engagement with the work of Southern urban scholars writing on and in the South. I began by situating my work as Southern scholarship that aims to theorise urbanisation, dispossession, and climate displacement in ‘vulnerable’ and ‘at-risk’ Southern cities. Reflecting on names and places encountered in literature reviews, manuscript revisions, conferences, and conversations, I enquired into the invisibility of other Souths in studies of the urban global South. To contextualise the questions I raise, I used my experience and my scholarship as reference points for illuminating absences and silences in a field that constantly challenges itself to diversify and provincialise both knowledge and knowledge creation. Finally, I explored three correctives in support of decentring knowledge production and expanding the intellectual geographies of critical urban scholarship.