Beyond the Boom: Agrarian Life and Uncertain Futures in Peri-Urban Myanmar

Speaker: Courtney T Wittekind, Purdue University 

In this talk, Courtney T. Wittekind discusses her new book, City of Speculation: Unsettled Futures in Urban Myanmar (Stanford 2026), which traces the radical transformation of Yangon's outskirts during Myanmar's turbulent decade of reform (2011–2021). Through long-term fieldwork and digital ethnography, her research documents the lived experience of farmers who found their livelihoods, identities, and future potential tethered to an urban project that remained perpetually under construction. 

City of Speculation challenges the view that these residents were merely passive victims of encroaching capital. Instead, the book documents how the pressures of authoritarian resurgence, rapid urbanization, and climate volatility forced a concrete shift in how residents organized their lives: away from traditional agrarian solidarity and toward an individualized politics of speculative future-making. Wittekind argues that this shift was not incidental. Residents actively navigated the "New Yangon City" proposal by leveraging the language of speculation to contest state authority and redefine political participation. By mapping the social life of this new city, she shows that this "vernacular speculation" is not merely a response to volatility, but a structural feature of contemporary urban development in Myanmar—one that allows the state to outsource its failures to the individual calculations of the rural poor. 

Courtney Wittekind is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University, where she researches uneven urban development, speculative investment, and digital technologies. She received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice, from Harvard University in 2022. From 2022 to 2024, she was a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University with the Program in Agrarian Studies and the Council on Southeast Asia Studies. Her publications include articles in leading journals such as Cultural Anthropology and Antipode, as well as her forthcoming book, City of Speculation: Unsettled Futures in Urban Myanmar.