Student Spotlight: Sara Loh, Ph.D. Student, Department of Anthropology
Our second student spotlight of Spring 2025 is Sara Loh, Ph.D. student at the Department of Anthropology, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Read Sara’s story here:
Research Focus
For her PhD research, Sara conducted ethnographic fieldwork with a peri-urban Temuan Orang Asli community, a subgroup of the original Indigenous peoples of Peninsular Malaysia, with support from a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant.
Her research examines how the Temuan, living on the peripheries of Kuala Lumpur and the wider Klang Valley, are adapting to floods amidst struggles for land rights and self-determination. As the city’s urban sprawl radiates outwards to these communities’ ancestral lands and rivers, and as the Temuan continue to balance both urban and rural livelihoods, her work explores how they navigate rapid urbanization-driven enclosures and increasing climate-exacerbated disasters while continuing to assert Indigenous resilience and resistance.
Sara examines floods and their governance as sites for disentangling these muddied relations. Her work is informed by training in kuleana anthropology at UH, which centers respect and relationality in research and methods, and by political ecology framings that focus on power relations and amplify community voices. Broadly, she is interested in community-based resource governance, decolonial methodologies, and comparative approaches to Southeast Asian Studies.
Her working dissertation title is Muddied Waters: Floods, Enclosures, and Indigenous Resilience in Peri-Urban Peninsular Malaysia.
Path to This Research
Sara Loh’s engagement with Orang Asli and Orang Asal communities began about a decade ago through rural community development, flood relief work, and social and environmental policy research. These experiences taught her that floods are not natural disasters, but are often manmade; disaster management, humanitarian aid and socio-environmental policy are deeply political; and community voices are often drowned out in multistakeholder conversations.
Most importantly, she learned that Indigenous communities have so much experience and wisdom stemming from multigenerational stewardship of their lands and rivers that we must respect and learn from. It is their voices that we must foreground in water and land governance.
Sara pursued an MA in Anthropology of Development and Social Transformation at the University of Sussex to further examine these themes. She is now extending this work in her PhD studies in Environmental and Applied Anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i. Sara also actively seeks ways in which her work can support my Indigenous friends in their struggles for rights to their land, and to self-determination, and is collaborating with creatives and communities in Malaysia towards this (see publications).
Current Projects
Sara is currently a Graduate Research Assistant for the Summer 2025 Sulawesi-Indonesia Field School. The project continues to build on a long-term collaboration with the Forest and Society Research Group (FSRG) at Hasanuddin University. This summer, the field school will work with FSRG to document oral histories of local communities and their forests in and around Bantimurung-Bulusaraung National Park, focusing on local stewardship and environmental change.
Sara first joined the LuceSEA Summer 2023 Sulawesi Field School as a graduate student, where the objective was to learn how to conduct short-term, collaborative research in multicultural, multidisciplinary, and multigenerational teams. Now in her GRA role, she coordinates field school planning, co-designs and teaches modules on Indonesian political ecologies, research methods, and ethics to prepare the team for the upcoming field school.
The collected oral histories from Sulawesi will be exhibited in Hamilton Library in Fall 2025. Additionally, Sara will serve as a peer mentor for the LuceSEA Chiang Mai Field School this summer.
Publications & Creative Work
Loh, Ci Yan Sara, Olivia Meyer, Olivia Haji Laidin, and Ariel Mota Alves. 2025. “Embracing “Slow Life” in the Field: Navigating Research Delays and Politics as Early-Career Scholars.” Journal for Political Ecology – Grassroots. Under review.
Loh, Ci Yan Sara, Dalilah Haji Laidin, Fatwa Faturachmat, Anna Robin Duerr, Pamula Mita Andary, Andi Vika Faradiba Muin, Ariel Mota Alves and Olivia Meyer. 2025. “ Collaborative and Comparative Reflections: Field Lessons from South Sulawesi, Indonesia and Khon Kaen, Thailand.” Forest and Society Journal. Forthcoming.
Sara also collaborates with Gerimis Art Collective in Malaysia, an artist-researcher-Indigenous partnership that works with Orang Asli communities to tell their own stories through multimedia formats. For more information, visit @gerimis_my.