Professor Catherine Allerton

Profile

Catherine Allerton is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her research is broadly concerned with the materialities and mobilities of everyday life in island Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on children and kinship. She has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in rural Indonesia (Flores) and urban Malaysia (Sabah). Her current work is concerned with children of Filipino and Indonesian refugees and migrants living in the city of Kota Kinabalu in Malaysian Borneo. This work rethinks approaches to child ‘illegality’ and statelessness and explores the implications of migration for experiences and understandings of time, care and childhood.

Research

Publications

• 2023. Discordant Temporalities of Migration and Childhood. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 29(4): 763-783.
  
• 2020. Invisible Children? Non-Recognition, Humanitarian Blindness and Other Forms of Ignorance in Sabah, Malaysia. Critique of Anthropology. Special Issue on ‘Willful Blindness’, edited by Judith Bovensiepen and Mathijs Pelkmans. 40(4): 455-470.
  
• 2020. Stuck in the Short Term: Immobility and Temporalities of Care Among Florenese Migrants in Sabah, Malaysia. Ethnos. Special Issue on ‘Care in Asia’. 85(2): 208-223.
  
• 2018. Impossible Children: Illegality and Excluded Belonging among Children of Migrants in Sabah, Malaysia. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 44(7): 1081-1097.
  
• 2017. Contested Statelessness in Sabah, Malaysia: Irregularity and the Politics of Recognition. Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies. 15(3): 250-268.
  
• 2016. (ed.) Children: Ethnographic Encounters. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
  
• 2014. Statelessness and the Lives of the Children of Migrants in Sabah, East Malaysia. Tilburg Law Review. Special Issue on Statelessness. 19: 26-34.
  
• 2013. Potent Landscapes: Place and Mobility in Eastern Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
  

Expertise