Amanda R. Cheong
Research Area
Education
Ph.D., Sociology & Social Policy, Princeton University, 2019
M.A., Sociology & Social Policy, Princeton University, 2016
B.A. (Hons), Sociology, University of British Columbia, 2012
About
I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. I study how legal status and documentation shape people’s lives, working primarily with stateless, undocumented, and refugee communities in Southeast Asia and North America. My mission as an academic is motivated by my own family’s experiences of statelessness and exclusion in their birthplace of Brunei.
Teaching
Research
Book Project:
Omitted Lives:
The Vital Costs & Consequences of the Legal Identity Crisis
An estimated 1 in 4 children under the age of 5 worldwide have not been registered at birth. Why, in our modern world, do so many people continue to fall through the administrative cracks? Omitted Lives offers a new thesis for unraveling the paradox of the civil registration gap. Set in the context of Malaysia, the book is an ethnography of the lives of marginalized families who have gone unaccounted for at the most basic level: the recording of their vital events. By chronicling families’ circuitous and risky journeys to obtain basic recognition, and the papers to prove it, I offer a humanizing account of vital statistics and their sociopolitical—and even mortal—significance. I found that who gets counted, and how, are inherently political choices rather than technical imperatives, and that these choices can be made in ways that omit unwanted populations from the nation by depriving them of the documentary means to prove their legal personhood. Popular fears about the demographic threats posed by migrants have transformed understandings about the recording of vital events from administrative procedures to declarations about the ethnoracial and moral boundaries of national identity and belonging.
Publications
[Selected]
Cheong, Amanda R. (2024). “Who Counts as a Stateless Person? Nation-Statist Logics and the Liabilities of Potential Citizenship Elsewhere.” Ethnic and Racial Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2024.2404482. [Open Access]
Cheong, Amanda R. (2024). “Racial Exclusion by Bureaucratic Omission: Enumerative Non-Recognition, Documentary Dispossession, and the Rohingya Crisis in Myanmar.” Social Problems. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spae003.
Cheong, Amanda R. (2023). “Theorizing Omission: State Strategies for Withholding Official Recognition of Personhood.” Sociological Theory 41(4): 377-402. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/07352751231206838. [Open Access]
Cheong, Amanda R. (2022). “Deportable to Nowhere: Stateless Children & Challenges to State Logics of Immigration Control.” positions: asia critique 30(2): 245-275: https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9573331
Cheong, Amanda R. & the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund. (2021). “How Driver’s Licenses Matter for Undocumented Immigrants.” Contexts 22-27: https://doi.org/10.1177/15365042211035330
Cheong, Amanda R. & Baltazar, Mary Anne K. (2021). “Too Precarious to Walk: A ‘Three Delays’ Framework for Modeling Barriers to Maternal Healthcare and Birth Registration Among Stateless Persons and Irregular Migrants in Malaysia.” Genus: Journal of Population Sciences 77: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41118-021-00129-3 [Open Access]
Cheong, Amanda R. (2021). “Legal Histories as Determinants of Incorporation: Previous Undocumented Experience and Naturalization Propensities Among Immigrants in the United States.” International Migration Review 55(2): 482-513. https://doi.org/10.1177/0197918320934714
Cheong, Amanda R. & Massey, Douglas S. (2019). “Undocumented and Unwell: Legal Status and Health Among Mexican Migrants.” International Migration Review 53(2): 571-601. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6939891/ [Open Access]
Cheong, Amanda R. (2018). “Immigration and Shifting Conceptions of Citizenship: The Case of Stateless Chinese-Bruneians in Canada.” In New Chinese Migrations: Mobility, Home, Inspirations. Eds. Yuk Wah Chan & Sin Yee Koh. New York: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/New-Chinese-Migrations-Mobility-Home-and-Inspirations/Chan-Koh/p/book/9780367594077
Awards
My work has received awards from the American Sociological Association, the Association for Asian Studies, and the United Nations Refugee Agency.
I have received competitive external fellowships and grants from bodies such as: American Sociological Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Southeast Asia Research Group.
Affiliations
Executive committee member, UBC Centre for Migration Studies.
Steering committee member, UBC Centre for Asian Canadian Research and Engagement.
Faculty affiliate, UBC Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies.