Events

This event is held in conjunction with the Ideas Festival Singapore 2024 – Insights from the Humanities & Social Sciences. Ideas Festival is an inter-university initiative organised by NUS, NTU, SMU, SUSS and SUTD, with support from Singapore’s Social Science Research Council (SSRC).

The metaverse is best understood as the convergence of multiple virtual worlds, augmented reality, and other digital experiences that together will create new forms of social interaction around commerce, work, entertainment, education, and so forth. The technologies to create these immersive and augmented worlds are rapidly evolving, driven partly by the AI revolution. However, what is far less clear is how this world of avatars, digital twins and digital currencies will be built, how it will be curated, who will use it, and how it will transform our everyday lives.

Join us as we glimpse into the metaverse and the computer-generated worlds that are now in development. The roundtable will consider the key questions, implications and themes that researchers in the social sciences and humanities are now asking about this next stage in our digital journey, particularly in Asia.

• What versions of Asia – urban, national, civilizational and at other scales – are rising to prominence?
• What narratives of Asian pasts and futures are bound up with embodied experiences of these emergent worlds?
• What present and future collaborative research possibilities does the metaverse open for HSS scholars in Singapore?

PROGRAM

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Chaewon Ahn is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore, who holds a joint appointment with the Urban Studies program at Yale-NUS College. She is an urban researcher who studies the role of urban data and analytical frameworks in shaping the urban environment, with a special focus on the nexus of community, smart city, innovation policy and urban models. She combines spatial analytics, data visualization and participatory data collection methods in her work while critically examining the model-making practices in urban planning decision-making processes.

Natalia Grincheva is Program Leader in Arts Management at LASALLE College of the Arts, University of the Arts Singapore, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Digital Studio at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on innovative forms and global trends in contemporary museology, digital diplomacy and international cultural relations. In 2020, she was awarded the Oxford Fellowship for her visiting research residency at the Digital Diplomacy Research Center at the University of Oxford. She is the author of three monographs: Geopolitics of Digital Heritage (Cambridge University Press: 2024), Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age (Routledge: 2020) and Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy (Routledge: 2019). 

Nien Yuan Cheng is a Singaporean performance scholar and dramaturg. She is a Faculty Early Career Award Fellow at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. She obtained her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney in 2020. Her work explores the poetics of storytelling and dramaturgy in the digital age, intercultural theatre, and oral histories in/as performance. Her work has been published in the Oral History Review, Studies in Theatre and Performance, and Performance Paradigm, among others. She has a forthcoming book, The Storytelling State: Performing Lives, published by the University of Hawaii Press (2024). For more information, please visit http://cheng-nienyuan.com

Tim Winter is Cluster Leader and Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. He moved to ARI from the University of Western Australia, where he was a Professorial Future Fellow of the Australian Research Council. Tim has led the development of heritage diplomacy as a cross-disciplinary concept and introduced geocultural power to the analysis of international affairs. Recent articles on these topics appear in Geopolitics, International Affairs, International Journal of Cultural Policy, and Environment and Planning D. His most recent books are Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty-First Century (University of Chicago Press 2019) and The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford University Press, 2022). He is now working on the book The Metaverse: Lessons from History.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this online talk have been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to valerie.yeo@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.