The management of foreign manpower is vital for any labor import country as failure to ensure efficacy in the achievement of labor migration policies and program goals often generates a whole range of unintended consequences like xenophobia, politicization of migration, irregular migration, and eventually, cessation of labor migration programs. Despite the abundance of research on …

WPS 57 Foreign Manpower in Singapore: Classes, Policies and Management Read More »

This paper is about the social and cultural significance of hotels in the Nepal Himalaya. Through a socio-semiotic approach, I analyse how the hotel in Himalayan tourism functions as an architectural form that mediates different social domains, and through the process embeds the ideology of ‘development’ in everyday life, producing the power relations that would …

WPS 56 Hotels as Sites of Power: Tourism, Status and Politics In the Himalaya Read More »

The short film form in Southeast Asia is a potent form of cultural production and one that contributes compellingly to the development and continued growth of the region’s moving image culture. This essay provides a preliminary theoretical framework within which to map the intricacies of the short film within Southeast Asia and offers a case …

WPS 55 Nomadic Trajectories: Mapping Short Film Production in Singapore Read More »

After more than three decades of the introduction of the Green Revolution with high crop productivity as the main objectives and results, yet with various unintended negative consequences, various parties have now seriously taken steps to counter the Green Revolution’s negative consequences on people and environment. One among others was the introduction of the Integrated …

WPS 54 Empowering Farmers, Improving Techniques? Integrated Pest Management in Cambodia and Thailand Read More »

Much use has been made of Chinese texts in re/constructing the history of Champa. However, the scholars who have done such work have generally not had access to the text translated in this paper –the account of Champa contained in the Song Hui-yao ji-gao ( 宋會 要 輯稿 ), or “Draft of the Collected Statutes …

WPS 53 Champa in the Song hui-yao: A Draft Translation Read More »

This article shows how Arab geographical conceptualizations of insular Southeast Asia came to be placed under the rubric of ‘Jâwa’ in the 13th century. It does so after examining echoes of another toponym of far greater longevity in greater depth, namely Zâbaj. It outlines how this earlier term served from the mid-9th century to mark …

WPS 52 Finding Java: Muslim Nomenclature of Insular Southeast Asia from Śrîvijaya to Snouck Hurgronje Read More »