SERINA ABDUL RAHMAN

Serina Rahman’s current areas of research include Malaysian rural and ethnic politics, Malaysian rural studies (especially of coastal and fishing communities), sustainable development and large infrastructural projects in Johor, as well as community empowerment and development. She has also written on the ethnography of Malaysian women and Islamic radicalisation, and is now looking into issues of poverty in Malaysia, and Sabah’s oil palm industry. These are all tributaries of her overarching fascination with Malaysian rural communities. She is a practicing conservation scientist and environmental anthropologist, with specific interest in the fishermen and youth of the western Tebrau Strait, amongst whom she has lived and worked with since 2008.

Serina began working for local communities at age 10 in New Delhi, India, and has never looked back. It was in the western corner of the Tebrau Strait there that she co-founded Kelab Alami in 2008, a community organisation that works to enable the local community to participate in and benefit from urbanisation through environmental education, citizen science and community ecotourism. This initiative has earned the organisation and the community recognition by the state government, state and federal agencies and local businesses. Serina was awarded the Iskandar Malaysia Social Hero Award for Environmental Protection (Individual) in 2014, while Kelab Alami won the organisational version of the same award in 2016. She is now the Malaysian Ambassador for Citizen Science Asia.

Serina is currently a Lecturer at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore (NUS) where she teaches a Master’s class in the Environmental Politics of Southeast Asia. She has also taught undergraduate classes on Malaysian Politics and the Politics of Southeast Asia under the Faculty of Political Science at NUS. She is also an Associate Fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, where she was a full-time Visiting Fellow between 2006 and 2022. Prior to that, she was a Research Fellow at the S.Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, and the Director of the University Malaya Centre for Community Engagement and Sustainability (UMCARES) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Her PhD in Science was from Universiti Teknologi Mara, Shah Alam, Malaysia, on community empowerment and education for habitat conservation. Her Masters in Applied Linguistics was from the University of Wales, Cardiff, specialising in orientalism in colonial imagery.

Serina has published myriad academic and institutional papers on Malaysian politics and the poor, Johor’s infrastructural development, coastal socio-economics and other issues related to the natural and cultural heritage of Iskandar Puteri and its rural fringes. She also writes books, articles, op-eds and commentaries on her various other interests.