Hello, I’m Yoga Prasetyo. I was born in the quaint seaside town of Tulungagung in East Java where I completed my primary and secondary education. I left Tulungagung at age 18 and have since been on the move, spending years in other cities that now feel equally homey to me: Depok, Kupang, Yogyakarta, Brighton, Bandung, and Singapore. I’ve recently relocated to the UK to pursue a DPhil in Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford.

My doctoral project builds on my earlier research on temporary migration regimes but shifts the analytical spotlight to an oft-neglected dimension: infrastructure. Using infrastructure as an analytical optic, I want to understand how the materialities of infrastructure intersect with migration control to constitute conditions of (ir)regularity for children of migrants. My focus is on the alternative school infrastructure in Sabah, which enables irregular children’s schooling but caps it at age 15. Viewing age not as a fixed legal category but as a performable identity, I ask how irregular children obscure or invoke certain childhood attributes to carve out spatiotemporal rhythms of learning, play, and work in the city as they approach adulthood.

Prior to Oxford, I was a member of the Migration & Mobilities cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, where I worked on CHAMPSEA (Child Health and Migrant Parents in Southeast Asia), the institute’s longest running longitudinal study led by Professor Brenda SA Yeoh. Aside from my doctoral research, I’m now an Assistant Editor at the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and an Associate Fellow at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). I am contactable via email at yoga.prasetyo@ouce.ox.ac.uk.