Professor Liew’s project, entitled “Sons & Daughters of the Soil: The Making of Citizens and Stateless Persons in Post-Colonial Malaysia”, will examine the legal and administrative systems that post-colonial states inherited and continue to use in conferring and denying citizenship. The proposed project will study the bargains racial minorities made in nascent Malaysia and how those bargains led to constitutional and legal frameworks that reproduce differentiated and hierarchical notions of citizenship. This project seeks to understand how contemporary iterations of citizenship, belonging, indigeneity and foreignness are manufactured through the colonial mechanisms of legal and administrative systems in Malaysia.
Professor Liew, along with co-investigator Amanda Cheong of the University of British Columbia, will document and analyze the experiences of racialized stateless persons, especially those from remote, rural and Indigenous communities. The proposed research will help scholars, students, policy makers, advocates and stateless persons better understand the unique experience of statelessness in post-colonial contexts, particularly among remote, rural and Indigenous communities, as well as the role law plays in shaping the belonging and survival of such communities.
SSHRC Insight Grants support research excellence in the social sciences and humanities. The goal of the Insight program is to build knowledge and understanding about people, societies and the world.
Congratulations to Professor Liew on this grant success!