Congratulations to UBC Sociology Assistant Professor Amanda Cheong, who was recently awarded the Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei Studies Group‘s annual Craig A. Lockard Prize!
The Craig A. Lockard Prize awards the best journal article published in the previous calendar year by a junior or early-career scholar addressing research on Malaysia, Singapore, or Brunei in any field of study.
This year’s prize is awarded to Amanda Cheong for her article “Theorizing Omission: State Strategies for Withholding Official Recognition of Personhood“, published in the journal Sociological Theory.
In their commendation, the committee writes that “Cheong’s article, “Theorizing Omission” conceptualizes and theoretically develops the idea of “omission”, which she defines as “the condition of being left out of administrative apparatus, such as civil registers, censuses, and identity management systems.”
“As a direct opposite to the state’s impulse and innate motivation to render their population legible (which prominent scholars such as James Scott and Timothy Mitchell have theorized), the article argues instead that such deliberate state omission is an attempt to withhold recognition to obviate state responsibility for unwanted populations.”
“Amanda bases her conceptual and theoretical development from her ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia, which looks at how birth certificates are differentiated or withheld from specific populations due to political anxieties over claims to Malaysian citizenship from illegal immigrants. She noted how politicians, registration officials, judges, lawyers, healthcare workers, and social service providers all played enabling roles to omit unwanted persons from official records, thereby handicapping citizenship claims and their associated benefits.”
“In awarding Amanda’s article this Lockard Prize, the MSB Executive Committee unanimously notes the article’s theoretical and conceptual innovation as well as its substantial impact on future research and policy implications. In particular, the article’s theory of “omission” is clearly relevant to current attempts by the Malaysian government to introduce constitutional amendments to deny citizenship claims to stateless persons and abandoned children.”
“In effect, the constitutional amendments are the Malaysian state’s explicit strategy to deliberately omit stateless persons from civil recognition and to entrench their stateless status with no prospective claim for citizenship recognition.”
This article is adapted from the MSB Group chair Dr. Cheong Soon Gan’s Facebook page. Read the original here.
