You are cordially invited to a CSEAS Tonan Talk, a Brown Bag lecture series. The talk is open to the public, and you can bring your lunch bag to the place. The details are as follows.

Title: “The Middle Classes and Urban Transformation in Asia: A perspective from the Philippines”

Speaker: Dr.Michael Pinches, Professor in Anthropology and Sociology at
the University of Western Australia and Visiting Professor of Graduate
School for International Development and Cooperation, Hiroshima University

Date: June 5 (Thursday), 12.00-13.30, 2014

Place: Tonan tei (Room No. 201), CSEAS, Inamori Foundation Memorial Building, Kyoto University

Abstract:
Accelerating over much of the past half century, people across Asia have
increasingly come to reside and pursue their livelihoods in cities. Once
this was seen almost solely through the lens of growing urban poverty
and disorder, identified with the growth of squatter settlements and the
informal sector. Today though, urbanization in the region is commonly
associated with increasing manufacturing employment, and a rapidly
expanding consumer middle class which, according to one source, is
expected to more than double over the next fifteen years. While bodies
like the World Bank and OECD, as well as national governments, celebrate
such trends as a measure of development in Asia, research at the local
level demonstrates not only the variability and complexity of these
trends, but also their often ambiguous and contradictory character for
the people experiencing them.

In this paper I explore these latter features of urban middle class
formation in reference to cities in the Philippines, emphasizing, in
particular, their conflictual social, cultural and spatial dimensions,
centred on relations between the middle class and other urban dwellers.
The paper focuses especially on the ideology and phenomenon of middle
class civil society and its relation to public space.

About the speaker:
Michael Pinches is currently professor in Anthropology and Sociology at
the University of Western Australia where he has lectured since 1987.
Prior to that, he taught at the University of Melbourne, Monash
University and the University of New South Wales, also in Australia, and
briefly at the University of San Carlos, the Philippines. In addition to
extensive undergraduate teaching, he has supervised many postgraduate
research theses dealing with topics based in Asia, Australia and Africa.

Michael is a long time Philippines specialist whose main fieldwork has
been in Manila, Cebu City, Palompon Leyte, all in the Philippines, as
well as with Filipino migrants in Perth Australia. His key research and
teaching interests focus on the changing character of urban social life
and the experience of social inequality. His publications include the
edited books Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia, London, Routledge
(1999) and Wage Labour and Social Change: The Proletariat in Asia and
the Pacific. Quezon City: New Day (1992). He is currently working on a
number of manuscripts dealing with class and urban space in Manila and
Cebu, as well as a smaller project on Filipino migrants in Australia. He
is past president and secretary of the Philippine Studies Association of
Australia, and serves on the editorial board of Anthropological Forum
and international editorial panels for Philippines Studies, Asian
Studies and Agham Tao. He has spent periods as a visiting research
fellow in: Asian Studies, Columbia University, New York; International
Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden; Research School of Pacific and Asian
Studies, Australian National University; and Asian Studies, University
of Melbourne.

Moderator: Hau Caroline (CSEAS)

This Tonan Talk is supported by “Southeast Asian Studies for Sustainable Humanosphere” Research Program, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), Kyoto University
 

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