Anita Lundberg

• Postdoc 'Evans Fellow' Cambridge, UK; PhD UNSW, Syndey
• Professor (Associate) at James Cook University

Sea level rise due to climate change is predicted to be higher in the Tropics. As a low-lying, highly urbanised island near the equator, Singapore is taking an active response to this problem, including through large land reclamation projects. Incorporating both environmental and aesthetic elements, these projects also serve to bolster Singapore's...

The Tropics is experiencing the fastest growing urbanisation on the planet and faces serious sustainability issues. This introduction to the eTropic Special Issue on ‘Sustainable Tropical Urbanism’ calls for a notion of plural sustainabilities in order to critique how urban sustainability has mainly been developed in temperate zones and transferred...

Inspired by a street art image of a Balinese dancer wearing a gas mask, this paper maps climate change systems and their impacts on the Tropics. Beginning with global expanses of melting ice sheets, it rides the currents of oceanic and atmospheric systems, explores rainforests and coral reefs, wanders the seas of the Indonesian archipelago, until i...

The Tropics have long been associated with exotic diseases and epidemics. This historical imaginary arose with Aristotle’s notion of the tropics as the ‘torrid zone’, a geographical region virtually uninhabitable to temperate peoples due to the hostility of its climate, and persisted in colonial imaginaries of the tropics as pestilential latitudes...

In this Introduction we situate the Special Issue on 'Tropical Imaginaries and Climate Crisis' within the context of a call for relational climate discourses as they arise from particular locations in the tropics. Although climate change is global, it is not experienced everywhere the same and has pronounced effects in the tropics. This is also the...

Tropical Futurisms situates the making of futures in the geo-climatic zone of the tropics with its shared-yet always specific-histories of colonialism(s) and ecological biodiversities. At the same time, this special issue acknowledges the pluralities of tropical cultures and their cosmological insights, technological imaginings, and multispecies vi...

Tropical Futurisms situates the reading of futures in the shared yet multiple modalities of this geo-climatic zone, acknowledging the social and political complexities, technological engagements, multispecies vitalities, and cosmological plurality within tropical regions. This first part of the double Special Issue emphasizes the diversity that com...

This is the second collection of papers in a two-part issue on the theme of Queering the Tropics. This second issue begins by delving into the notion of “Queering Tropically,” in other words, queering in a tropical manner or in the manner of the tropics. The term queering tropically simultaneously alludes to queering through tropes (figurative and...

This special issue entitled "Queering the Tropics" explores how queering as a methodology and gender and sexuality as a critical rubric complicate the study of the tropics and conceptions of tropicality. It also engages with how the tropics as a worldly zone, and the notion of tropicality as simultaneously material and imaginary, reconfigure notion...

The papers collected together in this special issue on the theme 'decoloniality and tropicality' discuss and demonstrate how we can move towards disentangling ourselves from persistent colonial epistemologies and ontologies. Engaging theories of decoloniality and postcolonialism with tropicality, the articles explore the material poetics of philoso...

This special issue is a collection of papers that addresses and enacts the theme of decolonizing the tropics. Each article provides a sense of how we can untangle ourselves from entrenched colonial epistemologies and ontologies through detailed articulations of research practice. Drawing together humanities and social sciences, the papers collectiv...

The papers collected together in this special issue on the theme ‘decoloniality and tropicality’ discuss and demonstrate how we can move towards disentangling ourselves from persistent colonial epistemologies and ontologies. Engaging theories of decoloniality and postcolonialism with tropicality, the articles explore the material poetics of philoso...

This special issue is a collection of papers that addresses and enacts the theme of decolonizing the tropics. Each article provides a sense of how we can untangle ourselves from entrenched colonial epistemologies and ontologies through detailed articulations of research practice. Drawing together humanities and social sciences, the papers collectiv...

Indigenous Australians are outstanding for the way their ontologies and practices do not rely on a Western dichotomy that opposes material and spiritual realms. Their multiple totemic visions of the Dreaming space-time always state a material actualisation in landscape and the reproduction of all forms of life based on the pluriversal agency of ani...

Tropical Materialisms concur on at least three things: humans are always entangled with non-human/material agents; such entanglement is necessary for any creative act to take place; and these same entanglements allow us to interrogate and re-evaluate preconceived notions about the world. This Special Issue aligns itself with the fields of new mater...

Landscape integrates both natural and cultural aspects of a particular geographical area. Environmental elements include geological landforms, waterscapes, seascapes, climate and weather, flora and fauna. They also necessarily involve human perception and inscription which reflect histories of extraction and excavation, of planting and settlement,...

Heatwaves and wave-inundated islands, prolonged droughts and rainforest fires, tropical storms and monsoon deluges, melting tropical glaciers and flooded rivers - although climate change is global, it is not experienced everywhere the same. Climate change has pronounced effects in the Tropics. The Tropics has become a critical zone of cascading tip...

This is the full collection of papers for the Special Issue Pandemic, Plague, Pestilence and the Tropics. The collection includes 15 papers ranging across poetry, literary analysis, cultural history and colonialism, zombie film analysis, speculative fiction, ethnography, anthropology, developmental studies, philosophy and science and technology stu...

This paper analyzes how knowledge is reproduced as “universal” in contemporary higher education and how this production of universality influences the application of knowledge. Using a case study of clinical psychology, it describes the results of over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a university and professional settings in Singapore with s...

The rapidly changing workforce of the C21st places increasing demands on higher education institutions to produce graduates who possess sound academic credentials and key skills, and who furthermore demonstrate the ability to transfer knowledge and skills from their studies to the workplace. This paper begins with a definition of key/core skills, f...

This is the second published collection of the two-part special issue on the theme Tropical Gothic. While the first issue provided a space for reflection upon the unique social, historical, political, cultural and environmental conditions of the tropics; this second issue demonstrates how creative writers and artists have a particular role to play...

The Gothic is undergoing a pronounced resurgence in academic and popular cultures. Propelled by fears associated with massive social transformations produced by globalisation, the neoliberal order and environmental uncertainty – tropes of the Gothic resonate. The gothic allows us to delve into the unknown, the liminal, the unseen; into hidden histo...

p>This is the second part of the eTropic special issue theme on Tropical Imaginaries and Living Cities. While the first part of this series concentrated predominately on concrete cities and the material imagination, this second issue explores notions of the tropics and cities through literary and artistic works. Thus in this collection of papers th...

p>The tropical metropolis of Singapore is on a quest to become a creative city. Its policies explicate the need to transform into a ‘renaissance city’, a global hub of creative industries and economies. Yet, for Singapore – better known for its panoptic rather than creative imaginary – the question remains ‘how does the government’s policy of creat...

This paper re-reads a selection of critical interdisciplinary theories in an attempt to open a space in higher education for cross-cultural dialogue during the rise of Asia. Theories of globalization, deterritorialization, power/knowledge and postcolonialism indicate that students and academics have the ability to re-imagine and influence globaliza...

This special issue of eTropic concerns living cities in the tropics and how they are conceived through the imagination. The collection of papers reminds us that urban environments are both created and creative spaces concerned with peopled and lived experiences and their interaction with material, cultural and natural environments. The issue is int...

The flâneur became a literary figure of 19th century Paris and was taken up as a theoretical figure in the early 20th century. During these periods the city was undergoing massive social, architectural and infrastructural change. Today, the notion of the flâneur is experiencing a renaissance as cities are undergoing significant restructuring toward...

Vampires and other blood-sucking monstrous beings constitute some of the most famous myths, legends and stories that continue to haunt contemporary societies. This special issue examines the presence of these beings within cities and their rural surrounds. The contributions to this special issue reflect upon vampires and other monstrosities in rela...

This paper discusses traditional vampire tropes as a tool for innovation and novel experiences in the history of video games. A selection of games and vampires will be analysed in terms of gameplay and storytelling elements to show how the rich mythology and folklore that characterises these liminal beings can be successfully employed in a variety...

The landscape of the tropics is being viewed from a fresh tropical lens. This year, the United Nations declared 29 June the ‘International Day of the Tropics’ – a day dedicated to celebrating and raising awareness of the tropical regions of the world. The date is the anniversary of the launch of the inaugural 'State of the Tropics 2014 report' by N...

p>The United Nations declaration of the ‘International Day of the Tropics’ intends to raise awareness of the importance of the tropical regions of the world – from their ecological and cultural diversity, to their unequal share of the burden of poverty. The date of the international day of the tropics on the 29th June each year, also celebrates the...

The landscape of the tropics is being viewed from a fresh tropical lens. This year, the United Nations declared 29 June the ‘International Day of the Tropics’ – a day dedicated to celebrating and raising awareness of the tropical regions of the world. The date is the anniversary of the launch of the inaugural State of the Tropics 2014 report by Nob...

Thinking through network theories (network science, actor-network theory, rhizomatics) and the phenomenology of space and place, this paper argues for the significance of academic research networks and their meeting spaces-places in the ‘public domain’ of colloquia. In the global neoliberal education landscape of university rankings, institutions w...

This special issue draws on ideas from two international meetings of the TransOceanik Associated International Laboratory (LIA). One was held in Paris at the Collège de France in 2014, and the other in Brazil at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianopolis, in 2013. The meetings explored the themes ‘Behind the scenes’ (L’envers du déco...

The question I would like to address for the conference theme of women and social transformation, a new era for a just and gender-fair society, is how networks and their potential for empowerment may contribute to this aim, especially in regions of tropical Asia. Influenced by theories in network science and philosophy this interdisciplinary keynot...

p>This special issue draws on ideas from two international meetings of the TransOceanik Associated International Laboratory (LIA). One was held in Paris at the Collège de France in 2014, and the other in Brazil at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianopolis, in 2013. The meetings explored the themes ‘Behind the scenes’ (L’envers du dé...

This paper provides landmarks for the study of the historical development and current expansion of academic psychology and clinical psychology education in Australia and three countries of the Malay Archipelago (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore). It reviews literature on the history of clinical psychology, and information from universities and psycho...

Understanding the cultural effects of the globalisation of knowledge is of central concern in higher education research. This reading maps an analytical space for research on cultural negotiations in academic disciplines. It re-reads Appadurai’s theory of global imaginaries (1996) through Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of deterritorialisation (1983;...

In the contemporary landscape of fast-paced and highly competitive societies, the computer has become an indispensable tool in both the workplace and education. The ability and knowledge to use computer software, gadgets and innovative equipment, empowers individuals to be at the cutting-edge in performing tasks and in finding solutions to problems...

Psychology is well underway in becoming a borderless science and discipline, with universal knowledge that can be applied in countries across the globe. This study explores the history and current status of psychology education in Australia, Singapore and Malaysia as these are major areas in which transnational exchanges in psychology education tak...

In the last two decades transnational education has intensified. This paper provides a case study of transnational education in South East Asia by mapping historical and current transnational psychology education in Australia, Singapore and Malaysia. Given psychology’s roots in Europe and the United States of America, and its close interrelation wi...

The Asian century raises a number of challenges that derive from convergence, global multicentredness, and the emergence of a more engaged diverse world. Some nations use multiculturalism as a tool to address these challenges. However, in a diverse and globalizing world, it is appreciating what we share in common rather than notions of difference t...

Thinking through network theories (network science, actor-network theory, rhizomatics) and the phenomenology of space and place, this paper argues for the significance of academic research networks and their meeting spaces-places in the ‘public domain’ of colloquia. In the global neoliberal education landscape of university rankings, institutions w...

In the global world of transnational education, Western universities - especially those with offshore campuses – draw in large numbers of international students. These students are of particular concern to English as a Second Language (ESL) professionals and First Year Experience (FYE) coordinators, for in these environments many of our students ar...

Informed by new interdisciplinary network theories and phenomenology this paper set out to undertake a preliminary study of the use of blogs as a tool for intercultural interaction and reflection for students on an international exchange program. The process of analysing blogs lead, however, to a deeper questioning of the premises underlying the 'B...

Anthropology is a discipline based on the motif of the journey and ‘the myth of the eternal return’. This is the journey out to the ‘other’in order to return to constitute ‘self, and this movement is a movement of desire. The desire is for wholeness, for self-presence, for a unified self. It is a desire for origins. And this desire is evident in an...

Material objects call to us and structure our being. They are not passive, while we are active—rather, they embroil us in their lives as much as we engage them. Hence, sociality is not solely a human function but necessarily involves environments and artefacts. The notion of material poetics is, in this sense, a mutually shaping matrix that affects...

This article arises from a performance of the exchange of whale meat as experienced during ethnographic fieldwork in the subsistence whale hunting village of Lamalera, Eastern Indonesia. The animist-Catholic beliefs of Lamalerans serve to sustain this ancestral ritual. Underlying orthodox western analyses of gift and exchange is a notion of economi...

Reading this article is to embark on an adventure through certain ethnographic and archaeological texts about a specific form of boat construction. The voyage sets out from the village of Lamalera in Eastern Indonesia where whaling boats continue to be built according to traditions passed on by the ancestors. However, while researchers write about...

The people of the subsistence whale-hunting village of Lamalera in Eastern Indonesia continue to hunt whales according to the traditions of the ancestors, and through this ritual practice the memory of the ancestors is brought to life. Similarly, in the retelling of the myth of the heroic origin voyage the ancestors are reawakened. This paper engag...

This article probes the sense of loss attendant upon beginning fieldwork in the whale-hunting village of Lamalera in Eastern Indonesia. This feeling of ontological absence was heightened when four boats were towed away by a harpooned whale, a tragedy which invoked the origin story of the first whale hunt that tells how Lamalera ancestors disappeare...

In 2009 the Bachelor of Arts Degree at James Cook University, a regional multi-campus institution in North Queensland, Australia, was flagged by the Vice Chancellor for "deep attention." This paper showcases the work undertaken as part of the university-wide curriculum refresh to improve the first year experience at JCU. It surveys and reflects upo...