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2012<strong>–</strong>2018, he was Professor and Leader of Asian <strong>Urban</strong>isms at the Asia
Research Institute, and Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public
Policy, National University of Singapore.
An artist-ethnographer, Mary Ann O’Donnell works across and
between academia and the public sphere in order to document, understand,
and critically participate in the post Cold War production of industrial
cosmographies, with an eye to imagining culturally resonant forms of sustainable
globalization. Her primary site of research and public intervention
has been Shenzhen, the oldest and largest of China’s Special Economic
Zones. She is a co-founder and director of the Handshake 302 Art Space in
Baishizhou and Director of Public Programs at the P+V Gallery in Dalang.
Vineeta Sinha is Professor and teaches at the Department of Sociology,
at the National University of Singapore (NUS). She is concurrently
Head of the South Asian Studies Programme and the Department of Sociology
at NUS. Her research interests are Hindu religiosity in the Diaspora, religion,
commodification and consumption processes, religion-state encounters,
Eurocentric and Androcentric critique of classical sociological theory.
Her publications include: A New God in the Diaspora? Muneeswaran Worship
in Contemporary Singapore (2005, NUS Press and NIAS Press), Religion and
Commodification: Merchandising Diasporic Hinduism (2010, Routledge)
and Religion-State Encounters in Hindu Domains: From the Straits Settlements
to Singapore (2011, Springer).
Peter van der Veer is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the
Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen and Distinguished
University Professor at Utrecht University. He is an anthropologist who
works on the comparison of Indian and Chinese religion and nationalism.
He has published many books, including Religious Nationalism (California,
1994), Imperial Encounters (Princeton, 2001), The Modern Spirit of Asia
(Princeton, 2014), and The Value of Comparison (Duke, 2016). Recently he
edited the Handbook of Religion and the Asian City (California, 2015).
Trevor Hogan teaches sociology and his research interests are in
social theory, history of ideas, urban studies, and cultural sociology. He is
Director, Research, School of Humanities and Social Sciences. He is also
Director, Philippines-Australia Studies Centre and Director, Thesis Eleven
Centre for Cultural Sociology. He is a co-ordinating editor of Thesis Eleven:
Critical Theory and Historical Sociology (Sage). With Peter Beilharz and