SEAC is hosting a Southeast Asia Discussion Series seminar chaired by SEAC Director Prof. Hyun Bang Shin on 21st November 2019. The main speaker will be Dr. Astrid Norén-Nilsson (Associate Senior Lecturer at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University) will be speaking on processes of elite formation within Cambodian civil society today as well as patterns of interaction between civil society elites and other elites, building on ongoing research for a comparative project on civil society elites in Cambodia and Indonesia. 

Summary of Dr Norén-Nilsson's talk: Building on ongoing research for a comparative project on civil society elites, this talk will discuss processes of elite formation and interaction in Cambodian civil society today, as well as boundary-crossing between leadership within civil society and government. Focusing on the youth sector, it will be argued that this perspective provides a good vantage-point for assessing elite reproduction and elite regeneration, as well as evolving relations between civil society, the government, and the dominant Cambodian People's Party, in today's Cambodia

• Dr Astrid Norén-Nilsson is an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University since 2016. She received her Ph.D. in Politics & International Studies (2013) from the University of Cambridge, U.K., where she was a Gates Scholar. She was a research fellow at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), Leiden, the Netherlands, 2013-15. Her scholarship focuses on the politics of Cambodia in the post-conflict reconstruction era (1993 -). She is the author of the monograph Cambodia’s Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination, and Democracy (Cornell SEAP, 2016). Her research interests include democratic change, nationalism, the politics of memory, and emerging notions of citizenship and social change in South-East Asia.
  
  
• Professor Katherine Brickell is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and SEAC Associate. She holds 15 years of area-focused expertise in Cambodia where she researchs the gendered geographies of domestic and working life, including violence against women, forced eviction, and most recently ‘modern slavery’ in the construction industry. She is a recipient of the 2014 RGS Gill Memorial Award, and 2016 Philip Leverhulme Prize, and journal editor of Gender, Place and Culture. Prof Brickell was Chair of the RGS-IBG Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group (2016-2018).

This event relates to SEAC's #governance theme.