Underfunded, Underrepresented, Yet Undeterred: Navigating Indigenous Research as Early-Career Scholars in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Inequities in education continue to have a pervasive impact on students, particularly those from ethnic minority backgrounds in Southeast Asia. Many of these students frequently face stigma due to their Indigenous identities (Kovats Sánchez, 2020), which can hinder their access to and participation in higher education (Anderson et al., 2022). This stigma they encounter is shaped due to their unique socio-cultural contexts (Pamoso et al., 2025) and is deeply rooted in experiences of marginalisation. However, students often respond to these stigma-related challenges with resilience, employing various coping strategies to navigate the barriers they face. Motivated to capture the nuances of these experiences of stigma, we created a research project aimed at amplifying the voices of these students. Our research project focused on the stigma and coping experiences of ethnic-minority students in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, seeking to uncover their recommendations for how they navigate and manage the stigma they experience. Our findings underscored how stigma and coping mechanisms vary across time, context and culture. Students’ narratives revealed that marginalisation from stigma is nuanced and complex, ranging from subtle microaggressions to more overt acts of violence. Despite these challenges, students’ stories showed a sense of resistance against the marginality they experience.