Kymberley Chu, PhD Candidate in Anthropology was awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI)’s Emslie Horniman Scholarship Fund and the Satusoma Fund. Their dissertation project is “Navigating Fragmented Frontiers: Malaysia’s Human-Primate Interactions in Plantations and their Peri-Urban Ecologies”. Awardees are citizens of the United Kingdom, Irish Republic or Commonwealth countries. The major aim of the Fund is to encourage postgraduates to pursue fieldwork, and so to develop their careers as anthropologists/archaeologists. 

The awards are made to those who have the potential to be outstanding anthropologists/archaeologists and whose projects will make a contribution to the disciplines of anthropology and archaeology. The Trustees also provide an informal mentoring scheme which offers academic advice and guidance to Horniman Scholars. Overall, Chu's dissertation project examines how shifts in state-corporate developmentalism are driving the emergence of novel human-monkey interactions in Malaysia. Chu will conduct 12 sustained months of ethnographic fieldwork in peri-urban landscapes developed by plantations that have converged into community parks, forested areas, urban neighborhoods, and other development sites in which humans and monkeys, especially macaques (Macaca fascicularis) and dusky langurs (Trachypithecus obscurus), come into contact.