AIDILA RAZAK

Aidila Razak is Special Reports Editor at Malaysiakini. She has been a journalist for more than a decade, and has won several awards for her work. She is passionate about social justice and human rights, and enjoys exploring the use of technology and data for better and more engaging journalism.

Among projects she had led or been part of include the May 13: Never Again, which combined traditional journalistic verification techniques with new technologies in presentation to revisit the May 13, 1969 riot and share the story to a new generation of readers, 50 years on. 

She has also used data to understand why Malaysians are becoming increasingly unable to live together, and since March has worked on the Kini News Lab’s Covid-19 tracker, a microsite which helps Malaysians make sense of the outbreak in Malaysia.

Among topics she has frequently reported on throughout her career is the treatment of blue collar migrant workers in Malaysia.

This has also shaped her coverage of the pandemic, where she helped shed light to issues of overcrowding in immigration detention centres, foreign workers or even tourists wrongly arrested in immigration sweeps in lockdown areas and rolling out the Covid-19 tracker page in migrant languages to serve the more than two million migrant workers equally or even more adversely affected by the pandemic. 

In November, with support from Projek Dialog, she published a series called Lone Passage, which tells the stories of unaccompanied child refugees who flee war and persecution on their own and learn to survive in Malaysia.

Through her journalism, she hopes to speak truth to power, bring to light stories from the margins and help Malaysians develop more empathy towards marginalised groups, and each other.

https://twitter.com/aidilarazak