Nga Shi Yeu

Shi Yeu (he/him) joined the department in 2023. Originally hailing from Malaysia (Port Dickson, Negeri Sembilan), he has a B.Sc. (honours) in Botany (minor in Psychology) from Universiti Sains Malaysia. He obtained his first M.A. in Anthropology at National Taiwan University and another M.A. in Environmental Anthropology from the University of Kent. During this time, his master’s projects concentrated on how contemporary hunter-gatherers rearticulate their decision to shift towards extractive capitalism after decades of forced dislocation and violence in deforestation in Sarawak. Rather than persisting in addressing past injustices in resistance form, indigenous communities negotiated the landscape boundaries by reinvigorating their bodily interactions with Chinese loggers in the period of the post-environmental movement. This work led him to receive two master’s thesis awards from Taiwan Society of Anthropology and Ethnology (2019) and Cultural Studies Association (2021).  

Prior to his doctoral work in Stockholm, he participated in several research projects on Austronesian indigenous groups and Han Chinese societies in East Malaysia (Borneo), Indonesia (Bali Island), and Taiwan. He lived in Taipei for years and previously worked as a research assistant on the history of nutrition and menstrual justice issues. As part of his interest in participatory approaches, he also collaborated with visual artists, indigenous communities, and state-led corporations in public exhibition-making.

To be less parochial, he reoriented his academic inquiries by attending to contested values, epistemological narratives, and social promises. His doctoral research focuses on the emergence of the ‘probiotic turn’ in self-care management through the consumption of friendly microbes in neoliberal urban Taiwan.

His PhD project is funded and supported by the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia, Wenner-Gren Anthropological Foundation, Center for Chinese Studies at National Central Library in Taipei, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, European Association of Taiwan Studies, Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography, Lund University's Centre for East and Southeast Asia, Helge Ax:son Johnsons Stiftelse, Lars Hiertas Minne Stiftelse, European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan at University of Tübingen.

He is also an editor for the Taiwan Insight platform at the Taiwan Research Hub at the University of Nottingham, UK.

Keywords: Medical anthropology, political ecology, feminist science studies, situated biologies, body politics, indigeneity, multispecies ethnography (microbe-human), digital methods, materiality, food consumption, corporate culture, Southeast (Malaysia) and East Asia (Taiwan).