Yoga Prasetyo
University of Oxford
Yoga Prasetyo is a first-year DPhil Student at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. His interests span themes including migration, childhood, irregularity, transnationalism, and urban infrastructure with a focus on Southeast Asia. In his Master’s dissertation at the University of Sussex, he examined the spatiotemporalities of urban infrastructure in Singapore, where the paradoxical but mutually constitutive processes of integration and segregation work in tandem to govern the lives of temporary migration construction workers. Yoga’s work was awarded three best dissertation prizes by the UK Royal Geographical Society, the UK Development Studies Association, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Building on this work, Yoga’s doctoral project trains an analytical lens on what he calls ‘irregular childhood infrastructure’, a set of systems, structures, and resources that are rendered but highly controlled to govern the lives of Sabah’s undocumented and stateless children, many of whom are of Indonesian and Philippine descent. Taking Sabah not as just another case study but rather as a locus of theorizing, Yoga hopes to go beyond legalistic explanations of irregularity and reconceptualize it as the cumulative, structuring effects of the spatiotemporal ordering of urban infrastructure.
