I am a Bidayuh scholar and strategist from Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo.

I began my working life as a conservation biologist, spending more than a decade living and working in forests across Borneo and Peninsular Malaysia, surveying primates and big cats, following wildlife trails, running field camps, and learning what conservation actually looks like when it is shaped by land, politics and exclusion rather than reports. Those years grounded me deeply, but they also revealed the limits of mainstream conservation when Indigenous Peoples are treated as stakeholders rather than as governing authorities.

Alongside my conservation fieldwork years, I was drawn into grassroots environmental and civic organising, particularly through my involvement with the Malaysian Nature Society (MNS), Kuching Branch, where I worked on building awareness around peri-urban nature and everyday environmental care. That period taught me that conservation does not only happen in forests or protected areas, but also in cities, neighbourhoods, and daily practices of attention and stewardship.

After stepping away from full-time conservation fieldwork, I became more directly involved in Indigenous land rights struggles in Sarawak, working closely with activists and community leaders. This included supporting communities resisting large-scale projects such as mega-dams through documentation, media work, and organising, and helping connect local struggles to wider national conversations. During the Bersih years, I was also involved in grassroots democratic mobilisation and helped organise the first Bersih rally in Sabah, experiences that shaped how I think about participation, power, and exclusion in national political life. I also worked with urban youth on participatory democracy and civic engagement before leaving Malaysia for doctoral studies.

I read for a MSc. (Distinction) and DPhil in Geography & Environment at the University of Oxford and Oriel College. My doctoral work grew directly out of field experience and Indigenous relationships, asking how conservation changes when Indigenous sovereignties, memory, and relational ethics are taken seriously rather than abstracted into data or policy language.

Today, my work sits at the intersections of decolonial methodologies, environmental governance, and equitable conservation finance. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the Sydney Environment Institute (University of Sydney), I am currently a Research Fellow at Macquarie University, Australia, where I lead Decolonial Cartographies, a project that examines how Indigenous lands are mapped, governed, and financed within global biodiversity systems. Alongside this, at the global science–policy interface, I am the Lead Author for Chapter 2, Indigenous and Local Knowledge for the IPBES Second Global Assessment, I sit on the Cali Fund Steering Committee as an IPLC respresentative for Asia (2025-2026), I serve on the ICCA Consortium as a Global Council Co-Chair for Documenting Territories since 2020 and also as the Regional Council Southeast Asia Documenting Territories representative, I collaborate with Arizona State University on global Indigenous futures as an Indigenous Fellow (2025), and sit on the editorial board of Progress in Environmental Geography. I have also worked as a consultant to the United Nations, contributing to biodiversity negotiations and Indigenous governance processes.

My scholarship introduces frameworks such as contra-memory, which explores how Indigenous stories and embodied memory act as forms of resistance to dominant narratives, and decolonizing conservation, which reimagines conservation through Indigenous sovereignties and ecological governance. My work has been published in peer-reviewed international journals across geography, conservation, sustainability, and cultural studies.

Alongside this academic and policy work, I co-founded Building Initiatives in Indigenous Heritage (BIIH) with my siblings and kin, a small Bidayuh-led foundation in Sarawak that works on ritual revitalisation and kinship governance. For us, rituals are not cultural performances or heritage artefacts: they are living systems of memory, authority, and care that continue to shape how Indigenous communities govern land and relations. I am deeply inspired by the life-long work of my father in his public service, political and ritual lives, and my grandparents who were ritual Chief Priest and Priestesses in Bau, Sarawak.

I write and speak across academic, policy, and public spaces, from community gatherings (including as the keynote speaker for the 2025 Indigenous Peoples Network of Malaysia, JOAS, national gathering) to national government platforms to UN forums, always trying to stay accountable to where I come from while working across scales. Much of my writing explores Indigenous survivance, memory, refusal, and the difficult question of what it means to care for land in a world that keeps trying to abstract it.

Reach me at junerubis @ gmail