Professor Jamie Liew wins Fulbright Award to study statelessness at the University of Hawai'i

By Common Law

Communication, Faculty of Law

Faculty member
Scholarships
Visiting professor
bio photo of Professor Jamie Liew set against backdrop of blue mountains
Professor Jamie Chai Yun Liew has been awarded a Fulbright Canada Traditional Scholar Award, which will allow her to spend a semester as a visiting scholar at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa.

From January to May 2024, Professor Liew will be continuing her SSHRC-funded research on statelessness, examining how citizenship laws have been and are continuing to be crafted in post-colonial/imperial settings. While at the University of Hawai’i, her research will look at the historical migration of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) people in Hawai'i, how this racial minority was mobilized in colonial development projects and how they negotiated personhood in the period of nascent nation-state building.  

Professor Liew hopes to explore how persons were and are constructed as foreign, stateless, diasporic, indigenous and as citizens. Part of this work seeks to examine how contemporary attempts to resolve statelessness have reproduced colonial/imperial tools of oppression, domination, erasure of peoples and communities and the performance and production of segregation and the ideal citizen. This work aims to complicate the colonial subject against occurrences of statelessness with a decolonial lens, in the context of the ongoing struggles that Indigenous communities face in claiming land. 

Fulbright Canada Traditional Scholar Awards are designed to enable Canadian scholars in all fields to conduct research, teach, or undertake a combination of both activities for one semester or a full academic year at any university or research centre of their choice in the United States. 

Congratulations to Professor Liew!