Eli Elinoff is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. His research focuses on the intersection of political and environmental change in urbanizing Southeast Asia. He is the author of the book Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand (University of Hawaii Press, 2021) and the coeditor (with Tyson Vaughan) of Disastrous Times: Beyond Environmental Crisis in Urbanizing Asia (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). In 2024, his coedited book (with Kali Rubaii), The Social Properties of Concrete, will be published by punctum books.