Has global trade improved or trapped social revolutions? Investigative journalists Suki Kim and David Bandurski join urbanist Andy Merrifield and Dr Gerhard Hoffstaeder to examine the correlation between national growth and the rise of social turmoil.
Stanley Pl, South Brisbane QLD 4101, Australia
Open in MapsGerhard is a DECRA research fellow and lecturer in anthropology at the University of Queensland. He has a BA in Social Anthropology and Politics and an MA in Social Anthropology from the University of Kent at Canterbury and was awarded a PhD in anthropology and sociology from La Trobe University in 2009. From 2009 to 2012 he was a researcher at La Trobe’s Institute for Human Security.
He conducts research in development studies, on refugee and immigration policy and spiritual and existential security as well as religion and the state. He is a regular commentator in newspapers, radio and online media on topics of his research.
His first book entitled Modern Muslim Identities: Negotiating Religion and Ethnicity in Malaysia is published by NIAS Press.He is co-editor of a volume on human security and Australian foreign policy as well as one on Urban refugees.
He is also course director for World101x: Anthropology of current world issues, UQs fifth edX massive open online course. The course offers a 8 weeks of anthropology episodes with an array of additional resources, including a host of interviews with fellow anthropologists. www.world101x.org
Suki Kim is a South Korean-born, American novelist and investigative journalist and the only writer ever to go live undercover in North Korea. Kim’s recent New York Times-bestselling literary nonfiction book, Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite chronicles her six months undercover living amongst the future leaders of North Korea during the final six months of Kim Jong-il’s reign. Her first novel, The Interpreter, was a finalist for a PEN Hemingway Prize, and her nonfiction has appeared in New York Times, Harper’s, New York Review of Books, and The New Republic, where she is a contributing editor. Kim has been featured on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria’s GPS and Christiane Amanpour Show and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, and her 2015 TED Talk has since drawn millions of viewers online.
Andy Merrifield is an independent scholar, urbanist and writer. He is the author of The Politics of Encounter, Magical Marxism, Dialectical Urbanism and Metromarxism, as well as numerous articles and essays on urbanism, art, literature and politics. His most recent book, The New Urban Question (2014), grapples with establishing new coordinates for urban research and politics under the current conditions of planetary urbanisation. His forthcoming book The Amateur (Verso, 2017) explores the spirit of amateurism in our age of the professional expert.
David Bandurski is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other publications. He received a Human Rights Press Award in 2008 for an investigative piece on China’s use of professional associations to enforce internet censorship guidelines. Currently analyst and editor at the China Media Project, a research program at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism & Media Studies Centre, he also produces Chinese independent films and documentaries through his production company, Lantern Films.
