Professor Ryo Takagi is a visiting fellow at the Department of Political and Social Changes of the Australian National University (ANU) from April 2024 to March 2025. He is a professor at Kanagawa University in Japan, specializing in cultural anthropology and mainland Southeast Asian (Thai) studies.

Prof Takagi began his academic life conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Nakhon Sawan, central Thailand, on the everyday construction of social order. Since then, he has been studying political, social, and community movements in Thailand, with a focus on community radio stations in Chiang Mai, and everyday politics in rural areas. Readers of Japanese can see his monograph, Micrology of Order: Ethnography of Interaction in Rural Thailand (Yokohama: Kanagawa University Press, 2014, in Japanese). He has also published a few pieces in English, most recently a chapter on “Reassembling the Community of Voice: Community Radio in Northern Thailand” in Ryoko Nishii and Shigeharu Tanabe eds. Community Movements in Southeast Asia: An Anthropological Perspective of Assemblages (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2022).

While at the ANU, Prof Takagi will be researching contemporary Thai political dynamics from the perspective of community movements, particularly in Chiang Mai, focusing on everyday practices through media such as community radio and social networks.