Chun-Yu (Jo Ann) Wang

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2018 - 2019 Academic Year

Refining Politics: Oil Development, Environmental Activism, and Political Improvisation in Rural Malaysia

Environmental activism against the developmental clientelist state has been central to Malaysia’s historic power shift that took place in May 2018. The old ruling coalition, the National Front, which had been in power since independence in 1957, lost power to the new ruling coalition, the Alliance of Hope. Wang’s research investigates how activism-based political subjectivity and solidarity – which are not reducible to nor predetermined by ethno-religious or class identities – emerge through a grassroots environmental movement against a state-led downstream oil and gas development project in a rural industrial region, and how these novel political configurations not only have contributed to the recent change of government but also constitute new conditions for rural governance and development.

Chun-Yu (Jo Ann) Wang, Department of Anthropology

Chun-Yu (Jo Ann) Wang is a PhD student at Stanford University, majoring in anthropology and minoring in history. Her research project examines downstream oil and gas development controversies and environmental activism in post-colonial and multi-ethnic Malaysia from the perspectives of political anthropology, environmental anthropology, and science and technology studies.

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