Ph.D. Candidate, Stanford University
Contributor, Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
Research Interests
Energy | Ethnic Politics | Infrastructure | Oil Politics | Petrochemical Industry | Petroleum Industry | Political Anthropology | Postcolonial States | Social Movements | Southeast Asia |
About Chun-Yu (Jo Ann)
My name is Chun-Yu (Jo Ann) Wang and I am a Ph.D. candidate and dissertation writer from the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. Informed by political anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), and critical area studies, my Ph.D. dissertation research project explores the ways in which ongoing controversies over a state-led, large-scale refinery and petrochemical development project in rural Malaysia have created and sustained novel spaces for the rearticulation and renegotiation of ethnic categories and relations.
Contact
Contributions to Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
View all of Chun-Yu (Jo Ann)'s posts on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.
Mobilizing Cemeteries, Representing Ancestors: The Infrastructure of Protest and the Anti-Petroleum Complex Movement in Pengerang, Malaysia
In 2011, the prime minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak, and the CEO of the national oil company Petronas, Shamsul Azhar Abbas, announced the “Pengerang Integrated Petroleum Complex” (PIPC) project: a billion-dollar, state-led, mega refinery and petrochemical complex. The PIPC project promised to transform Pengerang, a small fishing village, into a world-class oil and gas hub that would fuel Malaysia’s economic growth for decades to come. It is the biggest of its kind in Southeast Asia and has negotiated a joint venture agreement with Saudi Arabia’s national oil giant Saudi Aramco as of 2017, guaranteeing a supply of crude oil to the PIPC for 20 years to produce petroleum and petrochemical products for growing Asian markets. Beneath the official “success story,” promoted by the Najib government and Petronas of how this “Rotterdam Port of the East” would help Malaysia overtake Singapore as the leading oil and gas trading center of the (read more...)