Sarah Hui Ann Tan

Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) in Geography and the Environment

Supervisor: Professor Anna Lora-Wainwright

Home sweet homes: Exploring the everyday realities and temporalities of education-induced migration and transnational living amongst Malaysian Chinese in the UK

Academic Profile

Sarah is a human geographer and qualitative researcher.  Her doctoral research seeks to capture the lived experiences of Malaysian Chinese students and graduates as they search for and make ‘homes’ in the UK.  Sarah uses autoethnography, semi-structured interviews and focus groups to explore the emotional dimensions of decisions on mobility, alongside creative material and temporal strategies individuals might adopt to feel ‘at home’ and ‘belong’ in new environments. As they negotiate their lives ‘here’ and ‘there’, her research seeks to explore how two geographies intimately linked by colonial legacies are bridged in transnational homes.  Sarah’s doctoral research is fully funded by the Clarendon Fund, in partnership with Jesus College.

Sarah is a keen autoethnographer and has published autoethnographic accounts on various topics including: self-tracking personal exposure to air pollution in urban environments; and her experience as an international student in the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Before beginning her DPhil, Sarah completed her MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance at Oxford in 2021.  Her dissertation explored how Malaysians use humour to publicly and politically engage with haze pollution through Internet memes. In 2020, Sarah graduated with a BA in Geography from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her undergraduate dissertation focused on how Malaysian Chinese students navigated decisions about return migration at the end of their undergraduate degrees.  At LSE, Sarah was as an undergraduate research fellow in the Department of Geography and Environment for two years, funded by the LSE Annual Fund and the LSE Pro-Director for Education Vision Fund.

Selected Publications

Book chapters

Journal Articles