FASS Staff Profile

PROFESSOR JAMES D SIDAWAY
PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY
DEPARTMENT of GEOGRAPHY

Appointment:
PROFESSOR
Office:
AS2/04-02
Email:
geojds@nus.edu.sg
Tel:
65161493
Fax:
65 6777 3091
Homepage:
http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/geojds/
Tabs

Brief Introduction

I have served as a Professor of Political Geography at NUS since January 2012.  Previously I was Professor of Political and Cultural Geography at the University of Amsterdam and prior to that a Professor of Human Geography at Plymouth University, UK. During the 1990s, I was a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK.

 

My main research interests are:

1. Political geography and geopolitics, especially of cities, states and conflicts.  

2. The history and philosophy of geography.

 

Bringing these together is an enduring fascination with the connections between geography and area studies.

See for example: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263775816656520

 

 

Since 2017, this interest in the intersections of geography and area studies led me (with my NUS colleagues Shaun Lin and Chih Yuan Woon and others elsewhere) to study the consequences and reception of China's "Belt and Road" Initiative (BRI). This yielded two papers in the The Professional Geographer (2017 and 2019).  Both can be downloaded below. 

Other publications on this theme include special sections on financing BRI, published in Eurasian Geography and Economics, on politics and spaces of the BRI, published in Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, and on the BRI as method, published in Asia-Pacific Viewpoint. The introduction to each set can be downloaded below along with a sample of other publications.    

 

From 2005-2017 I was an Associate Editor of Political Geography:

https://www.journals.elsevier.com/political-geography

 

I am currently co-Editor of the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography:

 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14679493

 

 

My CV (available below) lists all of my publications and editorial service.

Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ASVu7WkAAAAJ&hl=en

 

 

 


cvjds 2 december 2023.pdf | politics and spaces of bri.pdf | AreaStudies.pdf | Neoliberalism3.0.pdf | LIBYAGJ.pdf | topology.pdf | banalgeopolitics.pdf | shadows on the path.pdf | chinese narratives on one belt one road in geopolitical and imperial contexts.pdf | reordering china respacing the world belt and road initiative as an emergent geopolitical culture.pdf | financing the belt and road initiative bri research agendas beyond the debt trap discourse-1.pdf | theorising from the bri.pdf | lines in the sand towards an agenda for critical border studies.pdf |

Teaching Areas

At NUS (and elsewhere) I have taught at all levels from larger introductory classes to specialist graduate modules.

I currently teach a final year (honours) undergraduate class on Geographical Thought and a graduate seminar in Political Geography.

 

 


Current Research

From 2009-2021, I worked with six other scholars on a multi-sited research project on security, life and work in Abu Dhabi, Doha, Erbil, Maputo, Phnom Penh and Yangon.

Selected papers from this work are downloadable below.

The work also yielded a 2021 book (published in the University of Georgia Press series on Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation) that was co-authored with a former graduate student:

https://ugapress.org/book/9780820360607/transecting-securityscapes/

Listen to a podcast about the book here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/transecting-securityscapes

 

From 2017-2022, I convened a Research Group on Borders, Mobility and New Infrastructures, supported by the Max Weber Foundation: http://www.maxweberstiftung.de/en/ueber-uns.html

Our foci were:

  • Changing borderscapes in Southeast Asia (and between Southeast Asia and the wider world): air, land and sea.
  • Cross-border infrastructures and new scales and spaces of interaction.

Details are here: http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/researchclusters/max-weber-foundation-research-group-on-borders-mobility-and-new-infrastructures.html

Building on the achievements of the former Research Group, and with ongoing support from the Max Weber Foundation, a new Research Partnership on Asian Infrastructures was established between the Asia Research Institute (ARI) at NUS and the Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien (DIJ), to run from 2022-2026. I oversee this partnership with Professor Tim Bunnell at ARI

Details are here: https://ari.nus.edu.sg/research/partnerships/ 

 

In recent years, I have returned to theoretical and methodological interests at the intersections of area studies, political geographies and geopolitics, especially in the light of “decolonial” writings. Two reflections (focused on methods of “psychogeography” and critical Muslim geographies) are downloadable below.   I have also been working with a former NUS graduate student and postdoc Felix Mallin (who is now based at  the University of Fribourg, Switzerland) on the history of the concept of geoeconomics. Our (open access) paper on this was recently published: Mallin, F., Sidaway, J. D. (2023) Critical geoeconomics: A genealogy of writing politics, economy and space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, online early. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12600

 


maputo.pdf | phnompenh.pdf | shards and stages migrant lives power and space viewed from doha qatar (1).pdf | securing urban frontiers yangon.pdf | ijurrgulf.pdf | pyschogeography pihg 9 june 2021.pdf | critical muslim geographies dialogues in human geography.pdf |

Last Modified: 2023-12-06         Total Visits: 34421