Resituating urban geopolitics: connections and frontiers

James D. Sidaway

James D. Sidaway is a political geographer at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore.

James D Sidaway has served as Professor of Political Geography at the National University of Singapore (NUS) since 2012. Prior to that he was a Professor of Political and Cultural Geography at the University of Amsterdam. He has also worked at several universities in England, following his PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London.

At NUS, he currently teaches undergraduate classes on cities, territories and states in the Middle East and on the history and philosophy of geographic thought. He also teaches a graduate class on political geography. His empirical research is currently focused on the urban transformations of Makkah, Saudi Arabia.

At NUS, he convenes a “Research Partnership on Asian Infrastructures” with The Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien (DIJ) which is one of the institutes of the Max Weber Foundation (MWS). His most recent book (co-authored with Till F Passache) is Transecting Securityscapes: Dispatches from Cambodia, Iraq, and Mozambique (University of Georgia Press, Athens GA, 2021).

Edyta Roszko

Edyta is an anthropologist with interest in maritime territorialisation, militarisation of oceans and seas, human security, markets and historical anthropology.

After her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology / Martin Luther University (Halle, Germany – 2011) which focused on religion and politics in Vietnam, Edyta did ethnographic research on Chinese and Vietnamese fisheries and militia in the common maritime space of the South China Sea. Bridging different historical periods and countries, the question of mobility, migration and connectivity of fishers compelled her to historicize fishing communities and to work in relation to and beyond the nation-state, security concerns and territorially bounded fisheries. By combining anthropology, political science, economy and history Edyta seeks to contribute to the wider discussion on globalizing fisheries, maritime enclosures and marine ecologies in past and present.

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