Living with coloniality and precarity in Southeast Asia
Precarity has emerged as a defining condition for many marginalised communities in Southeast Asia. This panel discussion brings together scholars working in the region to engage in comparative dialogue, share methodological innovations and build transnational solidarities.
The discussion, informed by recent studies conducted with Malaysian Indian women and ageing migrant domestic workers in Singapore, examines how historical and contemporary struggles for each community are reflected in broader patterns of exclusion, labour exploitation and gendered vulnerability across the region. It further explores the forms of solidarity, agency, and generative ambivalence in how women confront and transform their circumstances.
Rooted in interdisciplinary perspectives from psychology, sociology, anthropology, feminist and decolonial studies, the speakers explore how precarity is shaped by intersecting oppressions of racialisation, caste, class, and gender hierarchies, as well as age and disability. The event is aimed at deepening understandings of precarity as both a local and a global phenomenon so as to foster collaborative approaches to research, advocacy, and policy transformation. It will also feature the launch of an open-access research manual that will support scholars intending to engage in decolonial and transformative social research.
The event is supported by The British Academy.
Speaker & chair biographies
Dr Geetha Reddy is Senior Lecturer in Applied Psychology at the Open University UK and Principal Investigator of the British Academy funded EXCAPE-URMI Project and the Open Societal Challenges funded BUSSIN project. They apply a transdisciplinary approach to understanding how people make sense of colonisation, multiculturalism, and migration in contemporary societies. Geetha’s foray into the archives to understand colonial racial categorisation policies in Malaya during their PhD at LSE led to their current research with descendants of indentured labour, apartheid, anti-colonial resistance, and slavery in Brazil, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Africa. As part of a global academic movement that questions and disrupts western psychological understanding of our social worlds, they have co-edited three special issues on decolonising psychology and one special issue on developing a social psychological understanding of precarity.
Dr Megha Amrith is Associate Professor of Globalisation and Transnationalism at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University and Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant: ‘WELL-ASIA: The Pursuit of Wellness in Southeast Asia: New Encounters and Inequalities in an Emerging Industry’. She is an anthropologist and interdisciplinary scholar and has published on themes around migrant labour, care, ageing, inequalities, and wellbeing. Megha was previously Research Group Leader of the ‘Ageing in a Time of Mobility’ Research Group (2018-2024) at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, during which she carried out ethnographic research with ageing migrant domestic workers in Singapore and Hong Kong approaching retirement and return migration. She is currently Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Global Networks.
Enbah Nilah Sugurmar is a poet and educator from Malaysia. She is currently employed as the project manager and storytelling lead for EXCAPE URMI. In 2019, she graduated with a distinction in MA Comparative Literature (Africa/Asia) from SOAS, University of London under the Chevening Scholarship. Her thesis was on the literary representations of “Class Conflicts in the Assimilation of Malaysian Indians.” Her creative works can also be found in Tamil Terrains/நெஞ்சநிலம் anthology published by trace press, Toronto, the Anthology of Southeast Asian Eco-writing (Manoa Journal, University of Hawai’i Press), This is Southeast Asia (AUS), Innovation for Change — East Asia, and Adi Magazine (US).
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
Dr. Petra Alderman is Manager of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre and researcher with a notable country expertise on Thailand. She is the author of Branding Authoritarian Nations: Political Legitimation and Strategic National Myths in Military-Ruled Thailand (Routledge, 2023) and of articles in various disciplinary and area studies journals such as International Political Science Review, Geopolitics, Politics, and the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs.
*Banner photo by Kelvin Zyteng on Unsplash
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