Indigenous populations in Southeast Asia and elsewhere have become a major source of inspiration for more sustainable relations with the environment. Their animist orientations – attributing agency, personhood or spiritual powers to the non-human world – is what prevents them from treating the environment as a resource to be exploited. Extractive industries, by contrast, are seen to objectify the environment as an entity separate from human beings, which is what allows them to extract resources at an industrial scale. Through long-term ethnographic research in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Timor-Leste, this project investigates how natural resource extraction affects people’s diverse relations with the environment. However, rather than pitching indigenous communities against extractive industries, this project’s conceptual step-change consists in the development of a social interactionist framework that examines how animism and extractivism are constituted through their interactions. The hypothesis is that we find extractive logics within animist practices and that animist assumptions might also be uncovered within extractive industries. The focus on interaction allows us to determine whether animist orientations truly ‘protect’ against extractivism and how multinational corporations counteract criticism by incorporating the very logics on which this criticism is based. Ethnographic studies of resource extraction tend to be dominated by single cases, focussing on indigenous opposition and the incommensurability between indigenous and modernist ways of relating to the environment. The methodological innovation of this project lies in its comparative multi-scalar approach. Through historically informed, long-term ethnographic case studies in four Southeast Asian countries, it constructs a comparative matrix for South-to-South comparisons and examines how human-environment relations are constituted through their interactions at different scales.

The trade-off between stacking fault energy and capability of twining has been a roadblock in aluminum (Al) composites, due to low dislocation storage and weak strain hardening ability. The recent extra strengthening and work hardening in gradient twinned architectures had provided an alternative approach to increase balance between nucleated twins, high density of dislocation and stacking faults. However, there is still a huge challenge to achieve large scale strengthening bulk Al which generally nucleate sporadically and under extreme conditions. We aim to develop a practical but innovative technique with combining stress concentration and high strain rate deformation at low temperature via powder metallurgy (PM) combined with cryogenic laser shock peening process (CLSP) to fabricate advanced, large scale, high strength twinned Al/graphene-CNT composites with uniform and controlled alignment including nucleated twins and stacking faults. The results are interpreted by both molecular dynamics simulation and experiments. During the cryogenic process, the pinning effect of CNTs hinders the escape of dislocations from pile-ups resulting in high stresses in front of graphene-CNT and controlling plasticity via both high strain rate and high pressure. As local stresses in front of both graphene and CNT exceed the critical stress for twin nucleation, high-density deformation twins can be formed. PM combined with CLSP enables us to tailor specific deformation nanotwins architecture in bulk Al composite otherwise cannot be achieved by present methods. Parameters of shock pressure, strain rate and loading temperature for optimal thermomechanical properties and even shock loading direction effect on alignment of graphene and CNTs for better strengthening effect and twinning nucleation in Al are discussed in details. We expect to demonstrate the feasibility of tailoring nanotwinned architecture in advanced Al composites via CLSP process, which could be put into mass production

Since the 1993 reinstallment of the monarchy after the devastating rule of the Khmer Rouge and the subsequent Vietnamese occupation, foreign NGOs have been mushrooming in Cambodia. Several among these are charities that are based in Malaysia and the Arabian Gulf, and which have become the core of Muslim transnational networks that intersect in the country. These charities invested vast resources in order to reconstruct the Cambodian Muslim religious infrastructure and leadership, that had been almost completely wiped out during the Khmer Rouge. At the same time, they spread their own religious ideas and discourses among the country’s Muslim minorities. This research will inquire into how transnational Muslim networks and charities based in the Middle East and Malaysia have transformed the religious identity, leadership and infrastructure of Cambodia’s Muslim minorities. I will look into the evolution of the Gulf and Malaysian charities in the country, the patterns of the existing competition between them, and how the transnational flows and the transformation of the Islamic field altered the structure of gender relations among Cambodian Muslims. The chief method of data collection will be ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cambodia, Malaysia and Kuwait.