Project Lead:
Professor Catherine Allerton (Dept of Anthropology, LSE)
Project Summary:
Sabah, an East Malaysian state in the north of the island of Borneo, is home to thousands of children who have been born across borders to migrant parents from eastern Indonesia and the southern Philippines. Such cross-border births are unauthorized by the Malaysian migration regime, which treats unskilled and semi-skilled foreign workers as a mobile, single and ultimately expendable labour force. The descendants of such workers are, in many respects, Sabah’s ‘impossible children’. They are denied access to public education and healthcare, and spend much of their lives in workers’ housing or squatter villages, out-of-sight of Malaysian citizens. At constant risk of arrest and deportation, many of them begin work at a young age in Sabah’s factories and plantations. The lives of these children therefore have much to teach us about the reproduction of inequality and exclusion in migrant families, as well as the ways in which children come to feel a sense of (linguistic, cultural, and place-based) belonging.
Catherine Allerton carried out child-focused ethnographic research with children of migrants in Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah, from 2012-13. She has published a number of articles on this research, focused on child illegality, statelessness and short-term care in migrant families. She is currently working on two further articles, and is finishing up a book manuscript, Impossible Children: Migration and Belonging in Sabah, Malaysia.
This URF project will provide essential bibliographic assistance to Catherine as she completes these publications. The project is a library research project to map and assess the literature in Malay and/ or Bahasa Indonesia on relevant themes, in particular:
- Work on experiences of migration and the migration regime in Malaysia
- Temporary migration from Indonesia to Malaysia
- Conceptions of childhood in Malaysia
- Experiences of children and migrant families in Malaysia
The URF project will help to highlight the most relevant work by Malaysian and Indonesian scholars writing in Malay/ Bahasa Indonesia, in order that their research can be engaged with in Catherine’s current writing projects. Although Catherine speaks Sabahan Malay, her reading skills are not good enough to quickly complete this bibliographic review, and therefore she is looking for a student who is fluent in either Malay or Bahasa Indonesia.
Work period:
June to late August 2022 (75 hours working days and times are negotiable)
Summary of the work required from the URF:
The student is required to produce 3 separate bibliographic resources:
- An annotated bibliography of work in Malay and/ or Bahasa Indonesia on migration, particularly migration to Sabah, and particularly on the experiences of migrant families. This bibliography should be of at least 30 publications, with an emphasis on qualitative research, most likely by academics in Sociology/ Anthropology/ Geography departments.
- In addition, the student is asked to produce an annotated bibliography of work in Malay/ Indonesian on constructions and conceptions of childhood. Since the extent of such work is not known by Catherine, this is a more speculative aspect of the research, and part of the task will be to establish whether Malaysian and Indonesian researchers within ‘childhood studies’ are publishing on conceptions of childhood in the Malay world.
- On the basis of these annotated bibliographies, and in consultation with Catherine, the student will then write longer summaries of roughly 10 of the most relevant-sounding publications.
Catherine will take time to explain, in an initial meeting with the student, the sorts of work by Southeast Asian authors that she has already engaged with in her writing, and the kinds of research on migration and childhood that she is interested to find.
Skills the URF would need to complete the work:
Essential skills:
The undergraduate research assistant must be fluent in reading Malay and/ or Bahasa Indonesia, and must be able to easily translate academic titles and arguments from Malay/ Bahasa Indonesia into written English.
Desirable skills:
Familiarity with qualitative research, particularly research on migration, is desirable but not essential. Familiarity with universities in Malaysia and/ or Indonesia is desirable but not essential.
Anticipated outputs from the URF:
- Annotated bibliography of work in Malay/ Bahasa Indonesia on migration, particularly migration regimes in Malaysia, migrant families and migration in Sabah
- Annotated bibliography of work in Malay/ Bahasa Indonesia on ideas of childhood in Malaysia
- Summaries in English of at least 10 key publications from either bibliography
Benefits to the URF from the experience:
The student will gain experience in collaborative research with an established academic. Their CV will be enhanced by developing this research assistance role, and their work will be acknowledged in future publications.
The student will gain skills in bibliographic research that can be applied to their own academic work, especially for a dissertation.
The student will gain knowledge of issues concerned with migration in island Southeast Asia, the experiences of children of migrants, and the theoretical perspectives being developed by Indonesian and Malaysian researchers writing in Bahasa Indonesia and Malay on migration.