This year’s Oxford Development Studies Annual Lecture will take place in St Anthony’s College on the 7th of May at 11am.

Professor James Scott (Yale), will be talking on “In Praise of Floods and Wetland Refuges”.

James Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and is Director of the Agrarian Studies Program. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has held grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism. He is currently teaching Agrarian Studies and Rebellion, Resistance and Repression.

Key publications include: Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (1976) , Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985) , and Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1997); The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009) and Against the Grain: a Deep History of the Earliest States (2017).