Forced Migration Online: Blog

This podcast was recorded at the Refugee Studies Centre’s Annual Elizabeth Colson Lecture which was on Wednesday 21st May 2008 at Somerville College, University of Oxford. The Elizabeth Colson Lecture is held annually in honour of Professor Elizabeth Colson, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science, Yale University gave this years lecture on the subject of Zomia.

“Zomia is a shorthand reference to the huge, massif of mainland Southeast Asia, running from the Central Highlands of Vietnam westward all the way to northeastern India and including the southwest Chinese provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, and western Guangxi.”

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In this podcast Professor Elizabeth Colson is in conversation with Dr Anna Schmidt. Elizabeth Florence Colson is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work in anthropology addresses politics, religion, social organisation, social change, migration, anthropological history, and theory and the ethnography of Africa and North America. Colson is best know for her field work with the Gwembe Tonga of Zambia which began in 1956, through the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute as a control study of the social change caused by forced resettlement. All of Colson’s work is solidly anchored in ethnography and through it she has made theoretical contributions to the subdisciplines of applied development and political anthropology. Colson was also one of a group of academics that played an important role in consolidating the Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford in its early years, working closely with the former director, Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond and the development officer at the time, Belinda Allan. Dr Anna Schmidt is a political scientist who gained her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley.

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