Webinar: Crisis Infrastructuring: Malaysia: My Second Home

Speaker: Dr Sin Yee Koh from Institute of Asian Studies Universiti Brunei Darussalam

The Malaysia My Second Home (MM2H) programme, one of the world’s most popular retirement and lifestyle migration programme throughout the 2010s, has been at the receiving end of a series of disruptions that dovetailed the COVID-19 pandemic and Malaysia’s regime change and political crisis during 2018–2022. Drawing from interviews with aspiring migrants, current migrants, and members of the MM2H migration infrastructure, in this webinar I examine how various stakeholder groups respond to, defend, challenge and contest the programme’s impending infrastructural breakdown and transformation. I interrogate the discursive strategies used by each group to advance their positions and concerns in their attempts to “rescue” the MM2H migration infrastructure and its existing logics of operation. I propose the concept of “crisis infrastructuring” to capture the repair work and the exploration of alternatives undertaken by constitutive actors when an established migration infrastructure is perceived to be under threat – that is, in crisis. I argue that it is the (perceived) moment of crisis that facilitated infrastructuring efforts in an unprecedented and swift manner.

Bio
Sin Yee Koh is Senior Assistant Professor of Asian Migration, Mobility and Diaspora at the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. She is also Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. She is a human geographer working at the intersections of migration studies, urban studies and postcolonial geography. Her work uses the lens of migration and mobility to understand the circulations of people, capital, and aspirations in and through cities.