New Media in the Margins

Benjamin YH Loh is a media scholar who employs digital ethnography to study emergent cultures and the digital public sphere. Having received his PhD in Communications and New Media from the National University of Singapore, he focuses much of his work on the confluence between technology and society, with a particular focus on minority and marginalised communities. He is currently a senior lecturer at the School of Media and Communication, Taylor’s University. He recently co-edited a book on the Sabah state elections entitled Sabah from the Ground: The 2020 elections and the politics of survival.  James Chin is a professor of Asian Studies at the University of Tasmania. He was the inaugural director of the Asia Institute Tasmania and the founding head of the School of Arts and Social Sciences of the Malaysian campus of Monash University. He is also a senior fellow at the Jeffrey Cheah Institute on Southeast Asia, and wasa senior visiting fellow at Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (now the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute). He is widely regarded as the leading scholar of contemporary Malaysian politics, especially on Sabah and Sarawak. Prior to an academic career, he worked as a journalist in Malaysia and Singapore.

1. Introduction.-  Part 1: Indigenous rights and representation.- 2. Native Customary Rights land titles and thwarting deforestation: Digital acts of resistance among Sarawak’s indigenous peoples.- 3. ‘Some Orang Asli still think Najib is PM’: Representations and self-representations of the Orang Asli in the Cameron Highlands byelection.- Part 2: Migrant and refugee discourses.- 4. Romance through digital avatars: Online courtship, representation and ‘catfishing’ amongst irregular female migrants in Sabah.- 5. Grateful politics: Rohingya and social media in the time of the pandemic.- Part 3: The “Othered” minorities.- 6. Confronting Malaysian Indian stereotypes and state neglect: The ‘SuguPavithra’ episode within mainstream national discourse.- 7. ‘Our online-ness matters’: The construction of social media presences by Malaysian LGBTQ Communities.- 8. A ‘blue ocean’ for marginalised radical voices: Cyberspace, social media and extremist discourse in Malaysia.