16/04/2026
We were very pleased to host the second guest speaker of our Voices from Southeast Asia Seminar Series this week. Launched in 2025, the series celebrates scholarship and scholars from across Southeast Asia, beyond Singapore.
Dr. Vilashini "Vila" Somiah is a feminist anthropologist with a focus on the lived experiences, narratives and agency of Bornean women, migrants, Indigenous communities, and gender and s*xual minorities. A Sabahan of mixed Tamil and Indigenous heritage, she is a tenured Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at Universiti Malaya. With nearly fifteen years of research experience, Dr. Somiah has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Sabah, Sarawak, and the Peninsular of Malaysia. Her first book, Irregular Migrants and the Sea at the Borders of Sabah, Malaysia: Pelagic Alliance (2022), won the ACUM (The Universiti Malaya Award for Outstanding Achievement) for Best Social Science book.
Her vibrant talk on Wednesday, 15 April 2026, titled "Paradoxical Belonging: Law, Faith, and Stateless Transgender Lives in Sabah," explored the intimately entangled worlds of displaced, undocumented, stateless, and dispossessed Indigenous communities in Malaysian Borneo. Dr Somiah examined how one particularly marginalised group - stateless Muslim transgender s*x workers - is simultaneously hyper-regulated and unrecognised as rights-bearing subjects within a "legal infrastructure of exclusion" composed of civil law, Syariah law, and Native Courts in Sabah and Sarawak. As she concluded, "the result is a deeply uneven system in which impossibility is manufactured, abandonment is normalised, and morality is weaponised to further marginalise those at the edges of recognition."
In addition to being an internationally recognised scholar - her recent appointments include fellowships at the London School of Economics' Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre and Harvard University's Asia Center - Dr Somiah also serves on the Southeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies and co-founded The Datum Initiative, a regional research observatory working at the intersection of data, justice, and inclusive socio-economic transformation in Southeast Asia. Dr Somiah's work extends beyond scholarship; in her words, "to speak of one community, specifically stateless Muslim transgender women, is not just an academic exercise but an act of connection."
