Assistant Professor Amanda Cheong has received two awards and multiple honourable mentions from the American Sociological Association for three of her recent articles!
Assistant Professor Amanda Cheong
Dr. Cheong won the 2025 ASA Political Sociology Section Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship for an Article Award for her 2025 article, “Racial Exclusion by Bureaucratic Omission: Enumerative Non-Recognition, Documentary Dispossession, and the Rohingya Crisis in Myanmar.”
The article traces the bureaucratic bases of the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar and develops the concept of “bureaucratic omission” to reveal an alternative method by which the state’s symbolic power can be accumulated and exercised.
Dr. Cheong also won the 2025 ASA Human Rights Section Best Scholarly Article Award for her article, “Theorizing Omission: State Strategies for Withholding Official Recognition of Personhood.”
The article conceptualizes the idea of “omission” as the condition of being left out of administrative apparatus, such as civil registers, censuses, and identity management systems, and explores its use as a political strategy.
Along with the Human Rights Section award, the article also received an honourable mention for the 2025 ASA Development Section Faculty Article Award.
In their awards announcement, the committee noted that the paper is “highly innovative, contributing to a key interest in state capacity in the sociology of development… Overall, it is an essential contribution to political sociology, particularly in this political moment, and to many other subfields related to development sociology.”
Another article by Dr. Cheong, “Who Counts as a Stateless Person? Nation-Statist Logics and the Liabilities of Potential Citizenship Elsewhere,” received honourable mentions from two different awards this year: one for the Junior Theorist Award from the ASA Theory section and another for the Best Scholarly Article Award from the ASA Global and Transnational Sociology section.
“Who Counts As a Stateless Person” examines how the definition of statelessness is contested below the formal letter of the law in Malaysia. The analysis finds that stateless people, paradoxically, are produced through institutional and discursive repudiations of their claims to statelessness.
The Global and Transnational Sociology award committee noted that Dr. Cheong’s article is “a pathbreaking intervention in theorizing statelessness from a sociological perspective… It stands as a compelling model for scholars in global and transnational sociology to examine how the foundational logics of the nation-state system materialize in mundane governance and structure exclusion in South-South migration.”
