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Dr Seb Rumsby is an interdisciplinary scholar with a wide range of interests including everyday politics, labour exploitation, undocumented migration, ethno-religious politics, grassroots development and non-national histories. Seb unites these diverse themes with an empirical focus on Southeast Asian worlds and people. He completed his PhD at 91¸£Àû's Department for Politics and International Studies in 2020, before lecturing in Southeast Asian Politics and Queen Mary University of London. He is now a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at University of Birmingham.

His talk is based on his recently published book Development in Spirit: Religious Transformation and Everyday Politics in Vietnam's Highlands. The effects of development and nation-building projects are always felt unevenly, especially by marginalised communities. But these communities do not lack agency in this process. How do they participate in, negotiate, or resist state-led development? And what role do everyday religious and spiritual practices play therein? In his important new book, Development in Spirit, Seb Rumsby offers an original perspective on how the Hmong communities in the Vietnamese highlands have responded to development initiatives. Centring the everyday political, economic, and religious practices of local residents, Rumsby shows that Christianisation has opened a route to ‘unplanned development’ that put the Hmong on a trajectory both of formal integration into the economy and resistance to state authority and religious persecution.