CHAIRPERSON
Dr Kamalini Ramdas, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore
ABSTRACT
In this presentation, I suggest that Malaysia’s brain drain (i.e. the migration of tertiary-educated Malaysians with transnational migration experience, whom I call “mobile Malaysians”) can be understood as an outcome and consequence of British colonial legacies–of race, education, and citizenship as state-citizen relationship–inherited and exacerbated by the post-colonial Malaysian state. While not discounting previous studies explaining such migration as “exit” response to race-based affirmative action policies privileging bumiputera (“sons of soil”) Malaysians, I adopt a postcolonial perspective to show how legacies of colonialism initiate, facilitate, and propagate migration in a multi-ethnic, post-colonial migrant-sending country beyond the end of colonial rule.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Koh Sin Yee (www.sinyeekoh.wordpress.com) is Visiting Affiliate at ARI. She was previously Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Public Policy at City University of Hong Kong, where she worked on an ESRC-RGC HK funded research project on the super-rich and their transnational real estate investments in Hong Kong and London. Her broader research interests are in postcolonial geography, transnational migration, citizenship, ethnicity, and urban studies in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and London. She has published on Malaysia’s differentiated citizenship in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and Asian and Pacific Migration Journal.
REGISTRATION
Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP to Ms Tay Minghua via email: minghua.tay@nus.edu.sg.
