In Review: Asian Institute's Tania Li's Work as the 2024 Killam Prize Winner
On March 19, 2024, The National Killam Program announced the 2024 Killam Prize and Dorothy Killam Fellowship winners, recognizing excellent scholars who are driving the future of Canada. Tania Li, Professor at Department of Anthropology, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC), and Affiliate of the Asian Institute, was an award winner of the 2024 Killam Prize for her work in the Social Sciences.
Killam Prizes are awarded to Canadian scholars who have distinguished themselves through sustained research excellence, making a significant impact in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, health sciences and engineering. This year’s awards were presented at a ceremony in Toronto in early November.
Tania Li's early research in Southeast Asia concerned urban cultural politics in Singapore. Since then she has focused on culture, economy, environment, and development in Indonesia’s upland regions. Li's writing focus on the rise of Indonesia’s indigenous peoples’ movement, land reform, rural class formation, struggles over the forests and conservation, community resource management, state-organized resettlement, and the problems faced by people who are pushed off the land in contexts where they have little or no access to waged employment. Her work draws important attention to these issues.
Li's most significant book to date, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics, engages with the development of action in the region and explores a century of interventions by colonial and contemporary officials, missionaries, development experts and activists. Li approaches the conversation critically and engages head on with the expert-driven development schemes that pay little attention to local knowledge, cultural value, and livelihood practices, it has become a foundational work in the field of development studies. Translated into Indonesian and French, it is taught in universities worldwide.
Powers of Exclusion examines agrarian transition to see what happens to farmers’ access to land in the context of competing land uses (e.g. conservation, urban sprawl, plantation agriculture). Her prize-winning book Land’s End tracks the emergence of capitalist relations among indigenous highlanders when they enclosed their common land. Plantation Life explores the forms of social, political, cultural and economic life that emerge in Indonesia’s oil palm plantation zone.
To see more of her academic work, and policy and advocacy work, please visit her website.
