I know I haven’t been writing to this blog for a while. The holiday, the warm summer and a short break, I guess makes me a little bit lazy. But it was a wonderful break for me after one year on my PhD research. Just a little update with things I’m working on at the moment. The abstract for ICAS 5 (International Conference Asian Scholar- 5) have been accepted. The conference will be in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, August 2007. Meaning I will have chance to go back to my home town. So yes, before thinking about the plan of going back to my home town, my first priority now is to finish the paper. This paper is a join research paper with Dr. Peter Raisbeck from Melbourne University.
Meanwhile I’m also working on my research project MI Forum and preparing the next project ( which I’m still in the process of figuring out what I wanted to do). Since I started MI Website, I’ve been questioning, reading, researching and exploring about the notion of identity, this relates to national and cultural identity. Searching for Malaysian Identity was one of my main search. One of the members in MI Website respond to this ‘ What is not Malaysian?’. Perhaps by lookin at what is not Malaysian will help me in this. Although it is not easy to define what is not and what is.
There are many reason why the questions of identity is hard to define. Identity in my contexts mean the personal, self identity and how this relates in the development of national and cultural identity. Until now I still can’t say much about the notion of national and cultural identity and why does it matter to us as a citizen.