My fellowship experience has shown to me that not only is resistance desirable, but that another world can, and must, be reimagined, writes Christopher Choong.
When I applied to the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE) programme in October 2019, the world seemed to be quite different from the one I am in now. Malaysia was one and a half years into Pakatan Harapan (PH) rule, a newly formed government that came into power after defeating the incumbent Barisan Nasional government. It was a first in the history of this relatively young nation. The historic win was greeted with widespread euphoria and heightened expectations, a psychological barrier crossed with the hopes of dismantling entrenched corruption and shameful legacies.
But the euphoria was short-lived. By the time the AFSEE results were announced in 2020, the PH government had already fallen. A small faction from PH defected and formed a new alliance with opposition parties, which heralded the Perikatan Nasional (PN) government in March 2020. Barely a month after taking over, the PN government announced its first Movement Control Order on the back of escalating Covid-19 cases in Malaysia, a disease already declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization just a week earlier.
The onset of a ravaging pandemic, compounded by seismic political change, shaped the context in which I accepted my fellowship offer. There were concerns that my family and I would be travelling to the United Kingdom, a country with higher Covid-19 cases than Malaysia back then. There were also questions of whether I would be able to optimise my fellowship experience if most of the activities were conducted online.
Nonetheless, I felt that it was precisely this conjuncture of a global pandemic and a national political crisis that this invitation to take a critical distance from my work and revisit my own assumptions could not be timelier. Hence, surrounded by more questions than answers, coupled with heaps of uncertainties, I took the leap and left for London together with my wife and son.
In London, I had the chance to attend some in-person learning during the autumn, but the bulk of activities were delivered online. However, as we moved towards spring, it was getting clearer that the rest of the fellowship would go fully virtual. Confined to the flat for a big part of my time, perhaps one of the questions that left a vivid impression on me then was: “Who produces me while I am producing for the fellowship?”
My wife shouldered bulk of the care and domestic labour to maintain our household, while I was sitting at my desk, inundated with Zoom calls, trying to catch up on my reading and writing. In addition, there were delivery workers who sent our groceries, security guards who ensured safety at our accommodation, maintenance workers who fixed problems in our flat and teachers who persisted in educating our son during the lockdown. All of whom, plus many invisible others, spread across supply chains, freed up time and mental space for me to focus on the fellowship.
But the fellowship provoked me to ask broader and deeper questions. How is the social reproduction of me a racialised and feminised process, underpinned by continued coloniality? How have these processes produced our subjectivities—attitudes, motivations, priorities, understandings—to the point that we embrace these everyday practices and hierarchies as normal and natural? How different or similar are these processes from the reproduction of inequalities in the larger society and functioning of the global economy?
The materials covered in the fellowship provided me with the concepts to reflect more critically on these questions, at both the personal and societal levels and equipped me with the language to articulate my thoughts. Interactions with peers and speakers in the various modules further contributed to my understanding of how these different forms of power play out in different contexts, often disguising them as something else in drawing the contours of our ordinary, mundane lives. It was the combination of the fellowship’s content and community, together with the specificity of my own circumstances, that made these questions come alive for me in ways that I have never thought of before.
This brings me back to the global pandemic and national political crisis in Malaysia. At the end of my residential fellowship year, Covid-19 cases in Malaysia soared to an all-time high in August 2021. The PN government collapsed in the same month, unable to resolve the ongoing political deadlock. The ominous pandemic has destroyed lives and livelihoods for so many, despite the government’s declaration of a controversial national emergency to mitigate these shocks, but the damage was disproportionately distributed.
What are the forces at play that have reproduced these political standoffs and unequal effects of the pandemic in Malaysia? How have we been persistently mystified from seeing inequalities and injustices underlying these events for what they are? Where exactly are the blind spots? These are big questions, but if there is one provocative question that the fellowship has left me with, it is this: In reproducing myself and my place in the world, to what extent am I complicit in perpetuating these oppressive structures and processes, and conversely, to what length do I want to go in resisting them?
My fellowship experience has shown to me that not only is resistance desirable, but that another world can, and must, be reimagined. It is in this literal sense of embarking on a fellowship amidst a pandemic-defining, politically unsettling world, intricately complicated by invigorating possibilities, that I find myself in a different world from the one I was in before.
Applications for the 2022-23 Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme close on 10 January 2022.
The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Christopher Choong Weng Wai
PhD Candidate, University of Warwick
Christopher Choong Weng Wai is an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity. He is the Deputy Director of Research at Khazanah Research Institute (currently on study leave) and a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick.