This webinar is concerned with the notion of social disappearance amongst those living in the peripheries of the law, specifically within the Singaporean and Malaysian legal context. It looks specifically at the experiences of death penalty prisoners as well as their family members. Through specific case studies, informed in large part by in-depth interviews, the paper looks at the legal processes which works to take away essential elements of human existence such as time and human contact through bureaucratic violence.
To elucidate these points the sharing moves beyond definitions found in international human rights legislations and instead focuses on the intersectional elements which leads individuals not only to be disappeared physically but also socially. This research takes inspiration from Gabriel Gatti’s (2020) notion of ‘social disappearance’ by arguing that even in ‘normal times’, outside of so-called ‘states of exception’ individuals from ethnic groups, from specific locales or from underprivileged categories suffer the indignity of having their ‘social being’ eroded in a procedural fashion by the power of the law.
This webinar will show that the ‘socially disappeared’ and their families die social deaths due in part to their stigmatization by the communities they live amongst. This paper aims to expand the field of disappearance studies, emphasizing that the nature of being ‘disappeared’ is not necessarily premised on state violence alone but is part of a larger mechanism which includes social inequities and the flawed nature of legal systems more intent on criminalizing rather than assisting those at the very bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder.
Speaker:
Kar-Yen Leong is currently an associate professor at the National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan. His articles have appeared in Kritika Kultura, Memory Studies, Space and Culture, Indonesia as well as Death Studies. His other works also include contributions to an edited volume on Oral History in Southeast Asia published by Palgrave Macmillan and on Memory Activism published by Routledge. His interest looks at the intersection between memory, history, and human rights in Southeast Asia. Dr. Leong is currently involved in a project which investigates the materiality of human remains and bodies in the context of mass violence”
Discussants:
Thaatchaayini Kananatu is Deputy Head of School (Research) and Senior Lecturer in Global Studies at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. Her research focuses on sociolegal studies; law, politics and society; human rights and criminal justice in the Global South. Dr. Kananatu is author of Minorities, rights and the law in Malaysia (Routledge, 2020), and From the ghetto to the gallows: rights, race, class, and drug crimes in Malaysia in Capital Drug Laws in Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2025). She has published in Sociology Compass, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, Sexualities, and The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs.
Moderator:
Por Heong Hong is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Social Sciences, USM. Her research explores the intersection of health, welfare, medicine, nationalism, modernity and politics of body. In recent years, she has expanded her research to include politics of heritage and memory.
