<aside> <img src="/icons/swap-horizontally_yellow.svg" alt="/icons/swap-horizontally_yellow.svg" width="40px" /> A space for generative, reflexive moment for my PhD research. This is a space for my annotated bibliography → literature review → research proposal

A constant back and forth, the reflexivity of research is a never ending cycling of drawing connections, relating different ideas and then starting from scratch.

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Read through the different sections of pondering here:

To reconsider the case study

Literature Review

Building Definitions

How-to

Writing about Readings and Talks

Diagrams I like

Comments from Supervisor

My PhD is investigates the impact on cultural infrastructure of arts collectives in Malaysia. This means thinking through cultural identity in relationship to architecture built by the state in relationship to the people.

One key reference is the knowledge of Cultural Infrastructure, what the commons and infrastructure

“the essay holds in suspicion the prestige the commons concept has attained in the US and theory-cosmopolitan context, often signifying an ontology that merely needs the world to create infrastructures to catch up to it.” - Lauren Berlant

I am obsessed with writing prose slipped in the crevices of time-space. But what pulled me back is the clarity of Doreen Massey’s work on the politics of space.

First is to understand space as a product of interrelations where relations are embedded practices that are constructed through politics, identity and spatialities. Second, to imagine space as a sphere of possibility for the existence of multiplicity and heterogeneity which means the recognizing the non-inevitability of certain trajectories and universalizations of how the world is, and will be…The third key proposition is that space is always in process, always becoming, it is an open system. Such openness is a requirement for possible futures in which politics can make a difference (2009: 499).

Skelton T (2009) Doreen Massey. In: Kitchen R and Thrift N (eds) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. El Sevier Science, 1st edition.

One reference is Abidin Kusno, who presents how Global South Studies is dismantling the binary and introducing relational conditions such as how national identity is tied to a tripartite relationship between political, national and the urban built condition. I work on the last part in relationship to the first two. That’s why it’s taking a while.

Things I will be participating in!

Mistakes were Made

Arts Collectives in High Density Environments - Mapping Relations for the Future KongsiKL - IPHS Presentation

Making Mamak through SETTtheory

Presented Making Mamak at COEX with Ali Alasri

IASTE 2025

ANCER Conference 2025 CUHK

Things:

PhD Diaries

Important links

ANCER Research Camp

Resources I am digesting

Study Guides — Radical in Progress

Free, Fair & Alive

Notes from the Field | Dhondup T. Rekjong, Centering Native Languages in Western Scholarship — Critical Asian Studies

The urban influence of cultural infrastructures of Malaysia by arts collectives

Thematics of my thesis

Regenerative Thought - the heart, space and the worldings

Thesis Core and Heart - Maintenance, design and care of spaces

Neighbourhood influence of critical urban commoning

So why Malaysia? Lots of people ask me this question. Other than my obvious familial ties, the archipelagiac nation-state has a complicated histories of growing with diverse folks as well as migrating borders. To me, it sits somewhere in the future, but stuck, yearning for a neoliberal mode of islamic contemporary life. There are flecks of transnational histories embedded in the landscapes, food, cultural processions and urban life.

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