British colonial legacies, citizenship habitus, and a culture of migration : mobile Malaysians in London, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the relationship between British colonial legacies and a culture of migration amongst mobile Malaysians (tertiary-educated Malaysians with transnational migration experience). Drawing from Bourdieu’s “habitus”, I propose the concept of “citizenship habitus” – a set of inherited dispositions about the meanings and significance of citizenship – to understand how and why mobile Malaysians carry out certain citizenship and migration practices. These practices include: firstly, interpreting and practising Malaysian citizenship as a de-politicised and primordial (ethno)national belonging to “Malaysia” that is conflated with national loyalty; and secondly, migration (especially for overseas education) as a way of life (i.e. a culture of migration) that may not be recognised as a means of circumventing pro-Bumiputera (lit. “sons of soil”) structural constraints. Methodologically, I draw from my reflexive reading of archival documents and interview-conversations with 67 mobile Malaysians: 16 in London/UK, 27 in Singapore, six in other global locations, and 18 returnees. I argue that mobile Malaysians’ citizenship and migration practices have been informed by three British colonial legacies: firstly, the materialising of race and Malay indigeneity; secondly, the institutionalisation of race-based school systems and education as an aspired means towards social mobility; and thirdly, race-based political representation and a federal state consisting of an arbitrary amalgamation of socio-economically and historically diverse territories. The Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) further instilled state-led focus on “racial tensions”, resulting in default authoritative strategies to govern, educate, and motivate the citizenry. These colonial legacies, inherited and exacerbated by the post-colonial Malaysian state, contributed to the institutionalisation of Malaysia’s Bumiputera-differentiated citizenship and race-based affirmative action policies, with particular effects on education, migration and social mobility. By adopting a postcolonial approach to migration phenomena, this thesis highlights the longevity of British colonial legacies with long-lasting effects on Malaysia’s contemporary skilled migration, both in terms of migration geographies and citizenship practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".