Examining the spatial histories and practices of plantation and peri-plantation planning in contemporary West Malaysia, this research project aims to investigate the agro-ecological frontier of Pulau Carey (lit. ‘Carey Island’ in Malay) and its multiple intersections with the urgent issues of indigenous land rights, environmental justice, and agro-capital development. Part of the customary lands of the indigenous Mah-Meri community of western peninsular Malaysia, the Mah-Meri community of Pulau Carey has experienced generations of land-grabs and extensive environmental degradation of the native mangrove ecosystem due to the establishment of plantations and infrastructural projects since the late 19th century, from the British colonial era till now. Effecting major shifts in both cultural practices and livelihood, the presence of the plantations constitute a significant threat to not just the indigenous lifeworld of the Mah-Meri but the very environments of Pulau Carey.
Contemporary scholarships of Pulau Carey and the Mah-Meri have traditionally revolved around either anthropological accounts of Mah-Meri survival and cultural negotiation with politico-capital forces in Malaysia or ecological analysis of mangrove health, with a significant gap in discourses that address either both in tandem or provide additional analytical frameworks to consider broader implications of environmental justice, indigenous survivance, and multi-species solidarities. I aim to address the complex negotiations which inform constitutions of spatiality through design, and its multiple implications for capital, embedded in extractivist agro-industrial practices. Drawing on historical and spatial analytic methodologies, I aim to conduct visits to plantations, urban and architecture planning collections of national and colonial archives, and other centers of knowledge production to compose a portrait of entanglements: and from this, imagine new possibilities of solidarity, collaborative governance, and spatial relations for indigenous and environmental justice.