YRC Political Sociology of Health Speaker Series: Omitted Births and their Consequences, with Amanda Cheong

Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, Cheong discussed her ethnographical exploration, set in the context of Malaysia, on legally marginalized families accessing basic recognition of their existence, such as the documents to prove their existence, and the consequences of being omitted from civil registration.

Focusing on the theme of Political Sociology of Health, Cheong began her talk by noting without vital documents individuals were beyond recognition and beyond the resources to make rights claims on states and be included in mainstream institutions, such as healthcare. Cheong told anecdotes of the families she met during her ethnographic fieldwork, illustrating the challenges and consequences of being excluded from registration systems and living without vital documents.

Cheong explained the intergenerational transmission of irregular legal status, while recalling an anecdote of an infant named Cece and her mother and grandmother. Cece’s grandmother learned the hard way what it meant to be omitted and did not want Cece to be next. The two women brought Cece to the National Registration Department to apply for her birth certificate, but Cece, indisputably alive and existing in front of government officers, was denied access to birth registration because her grandmother was missing her documents.

She also recalled a young boy named Sabri, who was turned away from public school because he did not have the documents needed to demonstrate he was Malaysian and therefore eligible to enroll. The whereabouts of Sabri’s parents were unknown, but Sabri had a guardian, Morni, who loved and cared for him. Hoping to ensure Sabri would not be deprived of a public education, among other fundamental rights and freedoms, Morni experienced the lack of bureaucratic processes in place for obtaining a birth certificate for an older child as well as how undocumentedness compounded over time to make it progressively harder for individuals to acquire other vital documents.

Further exemplifying what could bar individuals from a valid legal status, Cheong discussed how “red books,” booklets which track mothers’ prenatal health, were a resource required for the civil registration of their babies but highly securitized. She also spoke on how the Malaysian state securitized red books, which helped establish the facts of an infants’ birth and guard access to national membership.

After discussing the consequences of omission from registration systems, shaped by racialized fears about the demographic threats posed by unwanted minorities, Cheong alighted on the key takeaway of her talk: the inclusionary project of civil registration paradoxically provides the bureaucratic foundations upon which states maintain the exclusionary project of citizenship.

Following the talk, Professors Amanda Cheong and Elaine Coburn partook in a Q&A session, where Coburn highlighted how Cheong’s research was a quintessential example of the sociological imagination at work, demonstrating how nationhood and belonging can cause many individuals to be sidelined.

To this end, Cheong answered questions about the gendered processes in civil registration, how she confronted relevant Foucauldian arguments such as the role of biopolitical intervention in people’s lives within her work and her experience conducting ethnographic fieldwork. She concluded the discussion period by reiterating how omission from civil registration was a practical means by which states denied individuals of rights and access to resources.

The consensus view among participants was that the talk was a clear picture of how politics and society interplay to create reverberant negative consequences for individual lives. The workshop ended with Dr. Wu acknowledging the funding support from the York Research Chair Program, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.