Hosted by the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University, Risa J. Toha, Wake Forest University, will discuss her field research concerning Singapore’s demographic composition and  its implications for ethnic politics, social harmony, and nation-building.

Debbie Fordyce, President of Transient Workers Council Too, and Laavanya Kathiravelu, Associate professor at Nanyang Technological University, will discuss their advocacy and research on migrant worker issues in Singapore. This event is sponsored by Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asia Institute and NYSEAN.

Yu & Me Books will celebrate and amplify Asian literary voices by hosting the upcoming authors Hamid Roslan, Shou Jie Eng, Judy Luo, and Jee Leong Koh. Each author will perform readings from their respective works.

Professor Chua Beng Huat, National University of Singapore, and Dr. Suraya Ismail, University of Cambridge, will discuss the issues that have emerged from the sale and ownership of 99-year leases on public housing units in Singapore. This workshop is hosted by the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

In her groundbreaking book, which re-centers Singapore women in the overlapping discourses of family, home, ecology, and nation, Angelia Poon will focus on the crafts, minds, bodies, and subjectivities of a diverse group of women in a talk organized by the Nanyang Technological University.

Organized by the SOAS Centre of Southeast Asian Studies and SOAS Southeast Asian Art Academic Programme, this lecture by Duyen Nguyen examines the Đồng Dương Buddhist gallery at the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang. She argues that the current display is an attempt to re-contextualize the original landscape of the Đồng Dương monastery and the significance of the Đồng Dương Buddhist art tradition. However, it offers insufficient interpretation due to the absence of some objects that have resulted in a de-contextualized display.

Unraveling the legacies of colonialism is a pertinent question for Singaporeans today. The Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) inherited the “ethnology” collection of the 19th-century Raffles Library and Museum, as well as archaeological material from the Malay World by H. G. Quaritch Wales in the 1930s. Organized by the SOAS Centre of Southeast Asian Studies and SOAS Southeast Asian Art Academic Programme, two ACM curators consider how decoloniality might take shape at the museum and will focus on curatorial and exhibition practices.

In his groundbreaking 1992 exhibition/intervention, artist Fred Wilson extracted materials from the Maryland Historical Society’s collection and curated them as disconcerting displays of historical violence. Taking a cue from Wilson’s intervention, Pamela N. Corey and Vera Mey will discuss case studies from Southeast Asia in which contemporary artists use the museum as a site and medium for decolonial critiques. This lecture is organized by SOAS Southeast Asian Art Academic Programme and the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore.

Singapore has regarded, and continues to do so, the United States as the indispensable power whose global power and reach Singaporeans are seen as invaluable to the stability, security, and prosperity of Asia. This belief was sorely tested during the presidency of Donald Trump and by China’s growing assertiveness in Southeast Asia. The transition to a Biden-led America will unlikely change Singapore’s perspective on and policy toward the US. That said, its view of the US has not meant and does not mean a commitment to take Washington’s side on every international issue and/or dispute the latter might have with other major powers, especially where Singapore’s interests are thought to be at risk.

Transient workers in the Chinese-dominant city-state of Singapore make up an invisibilized underclass of low-paid manual laborers. Numbering some 540,100 in 2019, they make up more than 10 percent of Singapore’s total population, while mostly working and living twenty-four hours per day in the private family homes of their employers.

One of Ho Tzu Nyen’s most prominent works, The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (2017-present) uses image, sound, and text to interrogate the culture which has constructed the notion of “Southeast Asia”– a term given to the region by the US military in World War II despite the eleven countries having no common language, religious or political structure.

Gerald Sim discusses his new book, Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability, with documentary filmmaker Tan Pin Pin. It is an interdisciplinary journey through a refreshing set of unique aesthetics from Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

The word “celebrity” has its roots in the idea of celebration, which in turn calls up not just an honored person but also a festive place. How does contemporary writing, in prose and verse, take up the terms of celebrity and celebration? Amanda Lee Koe (Delayed Rays of a Star) and Paula Mendoza (Play for Time) read from their work and discuss whom and where they celebrate, or not, in their scintillating literary debuts. This event will be moderated by Diane Josefowicz.

The “Citizens and the City” webinar series seeks to provide a platform for exchange between urban activists, academics, and citizens who share an interest in how people can get involved in cities. The first webinar of this series deals with one of the most pressing realms of action: unacceptable living and working conditions of migrant workers, which have received sudden attention in different cities around the world during the coronavirus outbreak. The questions and challenges that aid organizations deal with in their ongoing work on migration go beyond the dormitories and include inclusion projects and gendered experiences of the pandemic. In this installment, speakers Cai Yinzhou, Shailey Hingorani, and Rieya Piscano will talk about their NGO work in relation to migration and COVID-19 in Singapore and Manila.

What does it mean to eat chilli crab in the Anthropocene? Can we really expect to continue living the way we do in an unprecedented time of climate change? Can we ever be truly sustainable without addressing capitalism? Is individual action enough to sustain the kind of structural transformations that this moment demands?

Join Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Aidan Mock, Feroz Khan, and moderator Melissa Low for the launch of Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene: Environmental Perspectives on Life in Singapore, the first book to ground environmental issues in a Singapore context. We will discuss how our lives on this island are already deeply interconnected with the nonhuman world that flourishes all around us, the surprising environmental dimensions of life and culture in Singapore, and the kinds of changes that are necessary for humans – and Singapore – to survive and thrive in the Anthropocene.

Singapore is heading into its general elections under unprecedented conditions. Campaigning and voting will take place despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, the rules of campaigning and voting are unclear. Meanwhile, a new generation of politicians and political parties are emerging. How will these new players affect political representation, public debate, oversight of authority, minority rights, equitable public policies, and democracy in Singapore? Does Singapore have the right tools to address mis/disinformation and ensure fair competition? This webinar brings together a group of academics and community activists to discuss the key issues in Singapore. The webinar will highlight questions and concerns of young and first-time voters in Singapore’s electoral system.

This webcast, the second program in Asia Society’s “At Home with ASHK: Museum Webinar Series,” brings you Dr. Gauri Parimoo Krishnan, a Singapore-based art historian, independent curator, and museum consultant who has contributed greatly to her city’s vibrant art and heritage sector over the decades. Drawing on her rich curatorial practice, Gauri will discuss the post-modern curating of diversity and plurality; with emphasis on South Asian art history, community history, and living culture and how they illuminate Indian representation in multi-cultural Singapore. Gauri will also discuss how collections, modern replicas, and digital interpretations put heritage in context for future generations. Joining the conversation will be Prof. Kathleen L. Wyma from the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Hong Kong.

This Zoom webinar seeks to compare legal perspectives on the experience of technology, privacy, and COVID-19 crisis response in Australia, Singapore, Mainland China, and Hong Kong, which are not typically considered together. By comparatively exploring the legal frameworks for the COVIDsafe app in Australia, there is the potential to enhance international coordination in digital responses to public health crises, including issues such as digital pandemic surveillance measures and their legal frameworks, the tension/coordination between protecting privacy and combating COVID-19, and transnational movement of people/virus and lack of international cooperation of health information sharing.

(Image: Markus Spiske/Flickr)

This webinar, hosted by Temasek History Research Centre, will identify the type of civilization present in ancient Singapore during the 13th – 14th centuries. Wang Dayuan (1311–1350 AD) was known as one of the first Chinese traders to write about Longyamen. Based on Wang’s descriptions, Longyamen was long associated with piracy; an association later entrenched by subsequent travelers and researchers who cite his work. However, the activities and culture in Longyamen were unfamiliar to him, resulting in historical misconceptions. Evidence has shown that Longyamen was a political entity, and had powerful navy fleets and a prosperous economy.

The speaker, Tai Yew Seng, is a Visiting Fellow of THRC and a ceramic archaeologist who specializes in excavating and handling ceramic from kiln sites, shipwrecks, ruins, and tombs. He also has expertise in the Southeast Asian maritime trade with China.

UPDATE: This event has been cancelled.

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Post-colonial states realized their desire to promote Singapore and Kuala Lumpur to the status of international metropolises at the expense of slums, which were demolished. In the context of multi-ethnic countries, this urban politic is not without consequences for minorities. In this presentation, Delon Madavan will present the consequences of these two states’ urban policies on Tamils’ spatial presence and how they are received by the members of the Tamil community.

(Image: naim fadil/Flickr)

Research Workshop with Michael Gilsenan and Discussant Mandana E. Limbert

This draft chapter is from a book on capital and kin in the Hadhrami Arab diaspora (roughly 1880-1980). It focuses on a 'great house' in Singapore and the woman who is represented as an extra-ordinary figure of originary powers. Sharifa Alwiya (1868-1968), from a major trading family, the AlJunied, is always known by her Malay honorific, Mak Tok. A woman of wealth and considerable property holdings, she is represented in repertoires of active memory as originating patterns of cuisine, medicine, a family habitus, and complex social practices through her unique powers. This emphasis on Mak Tok opens up avenues of exploration and rethinking of the forms and practices of kinship, genealogy, property and culture in the Hadhrami diaspora that diverge from dominant historical and anthropological perspectives.