Congratulations to CMS affiliates Dr. Amanda Cheong and Dr. Antje Ziethen on receiving Public Humanities Hub Faculty Fellowship 2024-25.
The Public Humanities Hub Faculty Fellowships are awarded to scholars to support their development of Public Humanities research projects. Fellows receive a course-release and a research grant to work on an individual humanities-oriented research project. Discover the projects of awarded CMS affiliates :
Dr. Amanda Cheong (Department of Sociology)
“Stateless Youth Artistic Activism and the Citizenship Amendment Bill in Malaysia”
The Malaysian government is currently considering Constitutional amendments to restrict legal pathways into citizenship for stateless persons. These amendments would negatively impact numerous marginalized populations already at risk of statelessness, including migrant and Indigenous communities. While statelessness has become a subject of national concern in Malaysia, the voices of stateless people themselves remain marginalized in political and policy debates about citizenship, migration, and inclusion. This time-sensitive project is a community action research partnership that will facilitate the creation and mobilization of multimedia advocacy materials by stateless youths, harnessing the genres of punk rock music, creative writing, and graphic art. These materials will be used to educate Malaysian and international public audiences about the human rights issues at stake with the Citizenship Amendment Bill, and about the impacts of statelessness on young people’s lives. Our project will shed light on the creative political capacities of those who are abjectly politically excluded.
Dr. Amanda Cheong is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. They study how legal status and documentation shape people’s lives, working primarily with stateless, undocumented, and refugee communities in Southeast Asia and North America. Their mission as an academic is motivated by their own family’s experiences of statelessness and exclusion in their birthplace of Brunei. Dr. Cheong’s work has received awards such as the American Sociological Association Theory Section Shils-Coleman Graduate Student Paper Prize, and the United Nations Refugee Agency Award for Statelessness Research.
Dr. Antje Ziethen (Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies)
“Reverse Diaspora: The “Brazilians” in West Africa”
My project sheds light on an unknown chapter in transatlantic history. I study the relocation of Africans and African descendants from Brazil to West Africa during the 19th and 20th centuries. Standard conceptions of diasporic flow and cultural influence are usually studied in one direction: from Africa to its diaspora in the Americas, but these returnee communities of former slaves established a successful settlement system in Benin and Togo. Wielding considerable economic and political power, they have shaped communities and histories on the African continent. The public-facing component consists of a collaborative hybrid installation at the MOA, connecting the Latin American and African collections. The project involves students, MOA curators, and African authors. It will be accessible to visitors of the museum and its website, as well as to audiences in Togo and Brazil. The objective is to initiate conversations on slavery, racism, return migration, and resilience while creating alternative narratives about the African continent.
Antje Ziethen is an Assistant Professor of French in the Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia. She specializes in African literatures and francophone literatures, with a particular focus on (urban) space, migration, and gender. She is the author of Géo/Graphies postcoloniales. La Poétique de l’espace dans le roman mauricien et sénégalais (WVT, 2013) and the co-editor of Beyond the Postmodern: Space and Place for the Early 21st Century (2015) and Afrika-Raum-Literatur/Africa-Space-Literature (2014). Dr. Ziethen has published special issues on science fiction in French, literary transnationalism, and spatial approaches to literature. Her most recent publications deal with the Black Mediterranean, speculative fiction, and geographic metafiction. Currently, she is working on her second manuscript, which reads novels from across the African continent through the lens of transatlantic migration.
