Organizer: LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre 

Description:

LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre will host this talk by Dr. Junjia Ye (NTU; SEAC Visiting Fellow) on migration diversity and belonging in east Singapore.

Arrival cities, many of which are located outside of European and North American contexts, are experiencing urban growth because of migrants coming from an ever heterogeneous array of backgrounds. The management of migrants at both the level of the state and the everyday is also changing as a response to these shifts. How difference has been conceived, regulated and experienced through encounters in everyday spaces of these arrival cities has been well-documented (Amin, 2012; Watson, 2009; Wilson, 2011). 

Building upon this body of work, this paper examines the co-production of urban space through managerial practices by the state and the diverse users of the space. Dr. Ye analyze how migrant-driven diversity is produced through pastoral discourses of care and control. Drawing upon qualitative data conducted before regulations at City Plaza, in a neighbourhood in the east side of Singapore, she locates the sites of co-production at the level of policy regulation and at the levels of everyday surveillance in shared spaces where branches of the state such as surveillance technologies, explicit rules on signboards, auxiliary police officers and different groups of new arrivals (ie. “new migrants”) encounter one another regularly on weekends. She demonstrates that this production of difference from various stakeholders reinforces boundaries of civility through encounters, re-producing the desirable/non-desirable migrant. The arrival city is therefore marked by these diffuse generative forces that both subvert and reinforce dominant modes of belonging.

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