Dr Liana Chua

Biography

I am a social anthropologist and Tunku Abdul Rahman University Associate Professor in Malay World Studies. I obtained my PhD from Cambridge in 2007, and taught at Brunel University London for ten years before taking up this new position in 2021. I have long-term research interests in Malaysian Borneo, where I have explored conversion to Christianity, ethnic politics and experiences of development and resettlement among Bidayuh communities. My current research centres on the more-than-human politics, socialities and aesthetics of orangutan conservation in the ‘age of the Anthropocene’. As part of this work, I enjoy working across disciplinary and sectoral boundaries through collaborations with conservationists and public engagement.

Research

I have worked in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, since 2003. My PhD and early postdoctoral research centred on conversion to Christianity and ethnic and cultural politics among rural Bidayuh communities, while a second postdoctoral project entailed the study of landscape, morality and development in the context of a dam-construction and resettlement project in which four Bidayuh villages were entangled. My fieldwork in Sarawak drew me to my current research on the social, political, aesthetic and affective dimensions of the global nexus of orangutan conservation in the so-called 'age of the Anthropocene'. I explore these issues with a small team of doctoral students and postdocs via two projects:

1) POKOK: an anthropology-conservation collaboration (2017-2022) that investigates the causes and contexts of orangutan killing and human/orangutan conflict in rural Borneo and seeks to devise conservation strategies for mitigating this problem and engaging more constructively and ethically with local communities.

3) Refiguring Conservation in/for 'the Anthropocene': the Global Lives of the Orangutan (GLO). A multi-sited ethnography of the global nexus of orangutan conservation in the context of emerging 'Anthropocenic' ontologies, politics, socialities and discourses. This European Research Council-funded project (2018-2023) has two key aims: to explore if and how global conservation is 'scaling up' to meet the challenges of 'the Anthropocene'; and to cut the Anthropocene concept down to size by examining how it is apprehended, fragmented and reworked in multiple ethnographic settings.

These ethnographic foci have evolved in tandem with my other long-running research interests in theories of visuality and materiality, more-than-human socialities, indigenous museology, and the histories and politics of anthropological knowledge practices.

Engagement beyond anthropology and the academy is an important part of my research programme. Currently, I work with conservationists and conservation scientists through my research projects and involvement with Oryx: International Journal of Conservation, Conservation and Society, and the Section for Human-Primate Interactions (IUCN Primate Specialist Group). I am also committed to making anthropology more accessible and interesting to the general public. Please see my ‘other publications’ below.

Research interests

Religious conversion; Christianity; ethnic politics; indigeneity; development; resettlement; environmental transformations; biodiversity conservation; human-animal relations and multispecies ethnography; ‘the Anthropocene’; anthropology’s histories and knowledge practices; material and visual anthropology