Nga Shi Yeu
About me
Shi Yeu (they/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 re-oriented his academic inquiries by paying attention to contested values, epistemological narratives, and social promises. His doctoral research focuses on the emergence of the ‘probiotic turn’ in mental health management via eating microbes in neoliberal urban Taiwan. His Ph.D. is funded by Stockholm University and the Wadsworth International Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York (2023-).
Keywords: Neuroanthropology, postcolonial science studies, political ecology, mental wellbeing, psychopharmaceuticals, situated biologies, embodiment, kinship and relatedness, indigeneity, multispecies ethnography, microbe-human entanglements, gastrointestinal ecologies, imaginations, materiality, food consumption, corporate culture, urban space, Southeast and East Asia
Publications:
2021. Review of Forests Are Gold: Trees, People and Environmental Rule in Vietnam by Pamela McElwee (Washington Press, 2016). Journal of Archaeology and Anthropology 94: 145-154. (in Chinese)
2016. "Is It Possible to be Polyamorous?". Prize-wining Works of National Taiwan University Student Laureate for Philosophical Treatise 3: 37-45. (in Chinese)
2016. "Five New Records of Terrestrial and Lithophytic Orchids from Penang Hill, Malaysia". With Farah A. Nordin and Ahmad S. Othman. Tropical Life Sciences Research 27(2): 103-109.