Learn more about the work of CMS affiliate Prof. Amanda Cheong.
Amanda Cheong is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. She researches the impacts of legal status and documentation on people’s lives, collaborating primarily with stateless, undocumented, and refugee communities. Her work has appeared in venues such as Social Problems, Sociological Theory, International Migration Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. She earned her PhD in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University.
Can you tell us a bit about your academic background and what brought you to migration studies?
I’m a sociologist by training and use a variety of methods to understand how legal status and documents shape people’s everyday lives. In much of my research, I work in partnership with stateless, undocumented, and refugee communities in Southeast Asia and North America. This work is not just an intellectual preoccupation, but is deeply personal, as my own family’s experiences inspire it with statelessness, racial discrimination, and migration.
What themes or questions are central to your current research?
A lot of my research is devoted to unearthing the power and politics embedded in seemingly mundane and banal forms of bureaucracy and paperwork. I explore these themes as they’re experienced day-to-day by legally marginalized communities on the ground.
I am also devoted to documenting the lives and perspectives of stateless people—people who have no citizenship of any country in the world. Statelessness is a growing area of research, and public awareness of the topic remains relatively low. My work asks, What are the human dimensions of this legal crisis? And how do stateless people exercise their political agency in the face of abject political exclusion?
What do you hope will change as a result of this research?
I am deeply committed to the democratization of scholarly knowledge creation—that is, sharing my platform as an academic with the communities that I work with in the research process. One impact that I hope to have is to make more room at the academic table for stateless and other legally marginalized communities to have their voices heard in debates affecting them.
What’s a finding or moment from your research that surprised you or challenged your assumptions?
Across a couple of projects—my work on legal identity access in Malaysia (see Migration Insights brief no.2), and on a SSRHC Insight Grant project on so-called birth tourism in Canada led by my colleague Megan Gaucher at Carleton University—I’m learning more and more about the critical role of healthcare institutions in facilitating access to legal identity and the documents to prove it. An ongoing direction in our research is to explore birthright citizenship as a matter of health equity and reproductive justice for migrants and racialized minorities.
Are there any forthcoming projects or initiatives you’d like to tell us about?
I’m currently finishing my book, Vital Omissions, an ethnographic investigation of how people go missing from civil registration systems in Malaysia and why this matters for citizenship. I chronicle families’ journeys to obtaining basic recognition, and the papers to prove it, to provide a humanizing account of vital statistics and their sociopolitical–and even mortal significance. The main argument of the book is that people don’t just get left out of the register because of a lack of state capacity, but also due to inherently political choices about who should ethnoracially and morally belong to the nation. Please stay tuned!
