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Abstract
A sports-themed zone—a concentrated site of sports facilities—embodies both an ambitious vision and a rather speculative and risky building project. This nature of combining visionary ideas, risk, competition and contestation makes these zones sites of worlding practices. This paper investigates the role of the sports-themed zone Jakabaring Sport City, situated in the South Sumatran capital Palembang, as a worlding site of sports, modernity, urban development and competitiveness. As a venue of prestigious sports events, Jakabaring Sport City has gained international attention and has entered the competition with other sports complexes and cities. The analysis reveals the ambitious visions and pitfalls to turn a formerly neglected and "haunted" place into a symbol of modernity and success for the city and its political leaders. It also identifies the new meanings of connectivity and competition attached to the sports complex as a site of experiments and aspirations as well as the alternation of rural, urban and global elements that characterise Jakabaring Sport City.

Renaming the chair of "Comparative development and Cultural studies with a focus on Southeast Asia" to "Critical Development Studies—Southeast Asia" is the outcome of an intense intellectual, political and yet intimate process over the last three years. In autumn 2019 a group of international students from the MA Development Studies program reported the shock of experiencing racism in study groups and when looking for shared housing. While confined to online teaching, during class one student found the courage to share their experience of a racist incident on public transport in Passau, the perpetrator humiliating him before vanishing into anonymity.These distressing and painful aggressions urged us to start reflecting on our responsibilities and capabilities, as a chair at the university, to act upon discrimination and racism which still permeate higher education, and the field we teach - development practice. During regular research labs over the last year, we read and discussed texts and debates from critical theory and perspectives from fields such as feminist political ecology (FPE), post-development, decolonial theory and new area studies. This process of learning, unlearning and relearning built up to this minifesto. Following Kallis (2018), we call this a minifesto because unlike a manifesto, which would present our grand theory or idea, we present here a collection of small but significant ideas. We believe these ideas and the commitment to pluralism will help shape the teaching practice and learning environment at the chair.