Events

Jointly organized by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and Urban Studies, Yale-NUS College, Singapore

PROGRAMME

ABSTRACT

This panel considers Natalie Oswin’s 2019 book Global City Futures: Desire and Development in Singapore. The book offers a queer analysis of urban and national development in Singapore, the Southeast Asian city-state commonly cast as a leading global city. Much discourse on Singapore focuses on its extraordinary socioeconomic development and on the fact that many city and national governors around the world see it as a developmental model. But counternarratives complicate this success story, pointing out rising income inequalities, the lack of a social safety net, an unjust migrant labor regime, significant restrictions on civil liberties, and more. In Global City Futures Natalie Oswin contributes to such critical perspectives by centering recent debates over the place of homosexuality in the city-state. She considers the ways in which the race, class, and gender biases that are already well critiqued in the literature on Singapore (and on other cities around the world) are tied in key ways to efforts to make the city-state into not just a heterosexual space that excludes “queer” subjects but a heteronormative one that “queers” many more than LGBT people.

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Natalie Oswin is a former postdoctoral fellow and assistant professor in the department of geography at National University of Singapore, and is currently Associate Professor of Social, Cultural and Urban Geography at McGill University (Montreal, Canada) and the managing editor of the interdisciplinary journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Her research and teaching focuses on queer and postcolonial geographies, especially in relation to globalization and urbanization.

Kamalini Ramdas is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. She is a feminist geographer who adopts a theoretically grounded and interdisciplinary approach to education in social and cultural geography. Kamalini has published in Area, Environment and Planning D, Environment and Planning A, Gender, Place and Culture, Geoforum, NUS Press and Sayoni. She volunteers with Sayoni, a local LBTQ group in Singapore and is committed to teaching, researching and writing about how community politics and activism produce alternative spaces of care and possibility in society.

Alfian Sa’at is the Resident Playwright of Wild Rice. His published works include three collections of poetry, ‘One Fierce Hour’, ‘A History of Amnesia’ and ‘The Invisible Manuscript’, a collection of short stories, ‘Corridor’, a collection of flash fiction, ‘Malay Sketches’, three collections of plays as well as the published play ‘Cooling Off Day’. In 2001, Alfian won the Golden Point Award for Poetry as well as the National Arts Council Young Artist Award for Literature. He has also been nominated for the Singapore Literature Prize three times, for ‘Corridor’ (1999, Commendation Prize), ‘A History of Amnesia’ (2004) and his translation of the novel ‘The Widower’ (2016). Alfian has won Best Original Script at the Life! Theatre Awards four times, for ‘Landmarks’ (2004), ‘Nadirah’ (2010), ‘Kakak Kau Punya Laki’ (Your Sister’s Husband, 2013) and ‘Hotel’ (with Marcia Vanderstraaten, 2016). He is also the co-artistic director of the biennial Singapore Theatre Festival.

Yi’En Cheng is Research Fellow in the Asian Migration cluster at Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. His research interests lie in the intersection across education, youth, and mobilities in Asian cities. He is the guest editor of special issues ‘Geographies of Citizenship in Higher Education’ in Area (with Mark Holton) and ‘Mobile Aspirations? Youth Im/mobilities in the Asia-Pacific’ in Journal of Intercultural Studies (with Shanthi Robertson and Brenda Yeoh). Prior to joining ARI, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale-NUS College and Clarendon Scholar at University of Oxford where he completed a DPhil in Human Geography.

Daniel P.S. Goh is Associate Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. He studies state formation, postcolonialisms, race and multiculturalism, urbanisms, and religion. His recent co-edited books include Urban Asias: Essays on Futurity Past and Present (JOVIS Verlag 2018) and Regulating Religion in Asia: Norms, Modes and Challenges (Cambridge University Press 2019). His current work focuses on the cultural politics of history, heritage and global city making in Hong Kong, Penang and Singapore. He has published over 50 articles in journals and books; these can be found at www.danielpsgoh.com.

You Yenn Teo is Associate Professor and Provost’s Chair in Sociology at the Nanyang Technological University and author of This Is What Inequality Looks Like (Ethos Books, 2018). 

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you complete the form below to RSVP.