ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • A
CONTENTS ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • B
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 1
1.0
VISION AND MISSION
6.0
EVENTS
02
Vision and Mission
53 62
Conferences and Workshops ARI Seminar Series
2.0
MANAGEMENT
05
7.0
COMMUNITY OUTREACH
07 09 09 10 10
Message from Chair of International Advisory Board Message from Chair of Management Board Director’s Foreword International Advisory Board Management Board Steering Committee Administrative Staff
67 72 72 73 73
ARI20 Anniversary Roundtable Series Newsletters and Reports Media Coverage Digital and Social Connectivity ARIscope
8.0
GRANTS AND PROJECTS
75
Grants and Projects
3.0
ARI COMMITTEES
13
ARI Committees
9.0
PUBLICATIONS
4.0
RESEARCH PERSONNEL
15 15 16 16 18 20 20 21
Director Deputy Director Research Leaders (Senior) Research Fellows Postdoctoral Fellows Other Joint Appointments Research Associates/Assistants Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Visiting Professor in Arabia Asia Studies Distinguished Fellow Visiting Senior Research Fellows
79 84 85
Books and Journal Special Issues Asian Population Studies Articles and Book Chapters
06
21 21
5.0
RESEARCH PROGRAMMES AND ACTIVITIES
97 98
Awards and Honours Keynotes and Plenaries
11.0 SUPPORT FOR UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE STUDIES 101 102 104 106 109
Graduate and Other Teaching at NUS 16th Singapore Graduate Forum on Southeast Asian Studies Asian Graduate Student Fellowship Programme Asian Graduate Students 2021 Interns & Research Apprentices 2021
24
ARI’s logo depicts rice grains in star-like formation. Rice has been the main staple food for many of Asia’s peoples since the 4th century BCE. It forms the basis of communal bonds, an element of ritual in many Asian societies, and a common cultural thread across nations and societies. Rice cultivation, as one of the major agricultural activities in Asia, has implications for population, sustainability and ecology. In symbolic as well as material ways, rice touches upon many of the key socio-economic and cultural issues in Asia, and is a fitting emblem of the Asia Research Institute.
Asian Migration Projects 26 Transnational Relations, Ageing and Care Ethics (TRACE) 27 Child Health and Migrant Parents in South-East Asia (CHAMPSEA) Wave 2 29 Transnationalism and Diaspora: Enhancing Demography’s Contribution to Migration and Development 30 Asian Urbanisms 33 Changing Family in Asia 35 Identities 38 Inter-Asia Engagements Project 41 Sustainable Governance of Transboundary Environmental Commons in Southeast Asia (TECSEA) 44 Religion and Globalisation 47 Science, Technology, and Society 50 The Asian Peace Programme
10.0 ARI RECOGNITION
12.0 EXTERNAL RELATIONS 111
External Funding Received
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 2
1.0 VISION AND MISSION
VISION To be a world-leading hub for Asia-centred academic research MISSION To support ambitious, scholarly research that advances understanding of Asia and its place in the world
2.0 MANAGEMENT ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 4
2.0 MANAGEMENT
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 5
MESSAGE FROM CHAIR OF INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY BOARD
PROFESSOR TAN TAI YONG Chairman International Advisory Board
It is indeed an honour for me to assume the role of Chair of ARI’s International Advisory Board, as the Institute celebrates its twentieth anniversary. Having previously been part of the Institute’s Management Board since it was first established, I am proud to see how ARI has grown and flourished both locally and internationally under the leadership of the various Directors, each bringing their own individual strengths to lift ARI higher and cement its position as a leading social science and humanities research institute with a focus on Asia. The community of scholars that have benefitted from the ‘ARI experience’ over the years has steadily grown, and we can now see that many have used their time at the Institute not only to hone their academic skills but also to gain valuable mentoring and managerial skills. ARI’s own current director and deputy director are two such examples. Having first gained research leadership experience heading ARI’s Asian Urbanisms Cluster from 2009 to 2012, Prof Tim Bunnell led the Institute through 20th anniversary year, as Director. The Institute’s Deputy Director, Assoc Prof Maitrii Aung-Thwin, meanwhile, is a former ARI postdoctoral fellow. As the moderator during the recent finale to the virtual ARI20 Anniversary Roundtable Series, I witnessed the global reach of interest in ARI events and the close relationships the Institute retains and enjoys with its alumni around the world. The theme of the event—Asian Futures in Humanities and Social Sciences Research—was well selected as ARI builds on existing synergies and collaborative possibilities to move further ahead as a thought leader in advancing critical scholarship on Asia. Together with members of the Board, I look forward to continuing former Chair Prof Tommy Koh’s dedication and commitment to ARI, and the Institute’s continued success through grant getting activities and impactful research. I congratulate the ARI family for 20 years of success!
MESSAGE FROM CHAIR OF MANAGEMENT BOARD
PROFESSOR CHONG CHI TAT Chairman Management Board
2.0 MANAGEMENT
2.0 MANAGEMENT
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 6
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 7
A tremendously busy year of events and research activities marked ARI’s 20th anniversary, despite the restrictions of a pandemic. The seven clusters continued to organise workshops and conferences in a range of up-to-date topics in their respective research areas. The impact and constraints brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic were explored in areas ranging from migrant healthcare workers and infrastructures, international student mobilities and Asian communities and places of worship. Through initiatives such as the CoronAsur research blog and the Living with COVID-19 in Southeast Asia project, we get to witness and celebrate the resilience and adaptability of the human spirit in times of crisis. We also saw new research themes emerging, including Heritage Diplomacy, Heritage Digitalisation, Biodiversity History through digital humanities, and Retirement Health. This year saw several leadership changes at ARI. Prof Naoko Shimazu, a global historian, assumed the headship of the InterAsia Engagements Cluster from Prof Tim Bunnell. Assoc Prof Jamie S. Davidson, from the Political Science Department at NUS, assumed cluster leadership of the Identities Cluster and Prof Bunnell took over the leadership of the Asian Urbanisms Cluster. The Board is excited to follow the progress of these clusters under the new leadership. I would also like to extend thanks to Prof Jean Yeung for leading the Changing Family Cluster over a period of thirteen years. Her drive and mentorship over the years has not only yielded impressive publications but has also resulted in many cluster alumni moving on to take up key roles in leading universities around the world. We wish her all the best as she continues to explore the issues facing Asian families through the Centre for Family and Population Research. Finally, I would like to thank Prof Philip Moore for his contributions on the Board since 2016. We also welcomed to the Board two new members, Prof Joanne Roberts, incoming President of Yale-NUS College and Prof Chan Eng Soon, Director of Research, Office of Deputy President (Research & Technology), NUS. Together we look forward to more exciting and thought-provoking scholarship and synergies as ARI enters the next decade.
DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD
PROFESSOR TIM BUNNELL Director Asia Research Institute
The year 2021 was a symbolically significant one for ARI, marking the Institute’s 20th anniversary. While this provided an opportunity to reflect on existing institutional accomplishments, the overall orientation of what we came to refer to as ‘ARI20’ year was to consideration of future opportunities and trajectories. Ongoing pandemic restrictions dictated that this take the form of a series of virtual events. Each of ARI’s research clusters organised Zoom-based discussions on future directions in their respective transdisciplinary fields, culminating in a finale roundtable on 11 November. The Institute’s approach to celebrating anniversary year more widely centred on possibilities to reach globally-dispersed audiences through the dissemination of ARI20 content via digital channels as well as online events. In terms of attendance numbers, this strategy was a big success: the virtual roundtable series alone attracted a cumulative total of more than 1,100 people. A variety of anniversary-related resources are available at the Institute’s website. Highlights are the video that was specially commissioned for anniversary year, an online map plotting ARI’s global institutional reach in humanities and social science research, and a series of ‘in conversation’ interviews, including one with ARI’s first Director, Prof Anthony Reid. Together, these online resources both recall foundational contributions and highlight efforts at strategic renewal. The Institute saw some significant changes during 20th anniversary year itself. They include Assoc Prof Kong Chong Ho stepping down as research leader of the Asian Urbanisms Cluster to commence a joint appointment at Yale-NUS College. My thanks to Kong Chong for his contributions to ARI both within and beyond the Asian Urbanisms Cluster over the past four years. Anniversary year also saw the closure of one of ARI’s longstanding research clusters, Changing Family in Asia. A two-day virtual workshop held in October commemorated some 18 years of research on the ‘changing family’ theme at ARI. Involving the cluster’s founder, Prof Gavin Jones, and an impressive line-up of other cluster alumni, the event showcased the remarkable scholarly productivity of the Changing Family in Asia Cluster since 2003. My thanks to Prof Jean Yeung for her leadership of the Changing Family in Asia Cluster since 2011, and wider contributions to ARI stretching back to 2008. Following the closure of Changing Family in Asia, ARI put out a Call for Expressions of Interest in establishing a new research cluster, flagging particular interest in the strategic areas of environmental governance, food security, and heritage.
DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD
2.0 MANAGEMENT
2.0 MANAGEMENT
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 8
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 9
While 2021 was a year of change, and involved deliberation of further renewal, many good things stayed the same. Above all, there was clear continuity of ARI’s prodigious scholarly output and productivity. In terms of academic publications, that included 16 authored books, 115 journal articles, 15 book chapters, 10 journal special issues and 5 edited books. As far as academic research events were concerned, the Institute organised 17 international conferences/workshops in 2021, involving a total of over 2,000 participants, and 32 seminars, with almost 1,500 attendees in total (excluding figures from the ten anniversary roundtable events noted above). There was also continuity in terms of ARI’s hosting of the longstanding Asian Graduate Student Fellowship Programme (AGSF). The 16th iteration of this flagship regional capacity building initiative involved 34 graduate students from 11 Asian countries over six weeks, and a further 26 students from across the globe for a three-day forum. The Institute also continued to build momentum on external grant-getting, including securing grants from the two main sources of funding for humanities and social science research in Singapore. The Singapore Social Science Research Council (SSRC) awarded funding to ARI and Yale-NUS College for a two-year project jointly hosted by Yale-NUS College—Linking the Digital Humanities to Biodiversity History in Singapore and Southeast Asia (PI, Anthony D. Medrano of Yale-NUS College; Co-PI, Stefan Huebner of ARI). There is even more positive news to report as regards Tier 2 grants from the Ministry of Education’s Academic Research Fund. Two successful applications to this source of funding were led by ARI researchers. One led by Prof Brenda Yeoh examines gender dimensions of plastic waste disposal. The other led by Assoc Prof Maitrii Aung-Thwin will document historically marginalised figures in Southeast Asia’s institutional archives. Overall, ARI ended 2021 in a strong position, despite a full year of pandemic-related uncertainty and frustration. My thanks to the colleagues—administrative and academic—who collectively made this possible. We have much to look forward to as the Institute enters its third decade.
INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY BOARD
MANAGEMENT BOARD
CHAIRMAN
CHAIRMAN
Prof Tan Tai Yong President, Yale-NUS College
Prof Chong Chi Tat Director, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NUS
EX OFFICIO Prof Tim Bunnell Director, Asia Research Institute, NUS
BOARD MEMBERS
EX OFFICIO Prof Tim Bunnell Director, Asia Research Institute, NUS
Prof Sunil Amrith Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History, Yale University
BOARD MEMBERS
Prof Michele Ford Director and Professor, Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, The University of Sydney
Prof Chan Eng Soon Director of Research, Office of Deputy President (Research & Technology), NUS
Prof Kellee Sing Tsai Dean, Humanities and Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Prof Noah Lim Director, Global Asia Institute, NUS
Prof Steven Vertovec Director, Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity Prof Yeoh Chee Yan Chairman, National Heritage Board
Prof Damian Chalmers Vice Dean (Research), NUS Law
Prof Johanne Roberts Executive Vice President (Academic Affairs), Yale-NUS College Prof Vineeta Sinha Department of Sociology, NUS Prof Audrey Yue Head, Department of Communications and New Media, NUS
2.0 MANAGEMENT
2.0 MANAGEMENT
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 10
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 11
STEERING COMMITTEE
ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF
DIRECTOR
ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR
Prof Tim Bunnell
Ms Sharlene Anthony
DEPUTY DIRECTOR
EVENTS & OUTREACH
Assoc Prof Maitrii Aung-Thwin
Ms Valerie Yeo Ms Sharon Ong
RESEARCH LEADERS Assoc Prof Gregory Clancey
Ms Minghua Tay
Assoc Prof Jamie S. Davidson
FINANCE & GRANTS
Prof Kenneth Dean
Ms Iole Soto
Prof Naoko Shimazu Prof Brenda S.A. Yeoh Prof Wei-Jun Jean Yeung
RESEARCH FELLOWS Dr Fabian Graham Dr Chand Somaiah
POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW Dr Yoonhee Jung
ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR (SECRETARY) Ms Sharlene Anthony
SECRETARY Ms Ceron Tan
3.0 ARI COMMITTEES ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 12
3.0 ARI COMMITTEES
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 13
Members of ARI actively contribute to the running of the Institute in various ways, including through their participation in committees. In the year 2021 the following committees took up responsibility for various aspects of work involved in the running of ARI as an Asian centre for research fellows and graduate student researchers from the region and around the world. ARISCOPE
FIRE SAFETY Ms Sharon Ong
RESEARCH CAPACITY & STRATEGY
Ms Iole Soto
Prof Tim Bunnell
Dr Gerard McCarthy
Ms Minghua Tay
Dr Ningning Chen
Dr Michelle Miller
Ms Yiran Xue
Dr Jérémie Molho
Dr Eve Warburton
Ms Valerie Yeo
Prof Brenda S.A. Yeoh
Dr Theodora Lam Ms Clair Hurford
CHAIR COORDINATOR
Assoc Prof Jamie S. Davidson
Ms Valerie Yeo
NEWSLETTER & OUTREACH ASIAN GRADUATE STUDENT FELLOWSHIP COMMITTEE & GRADUATE STUDENTS FORUM Dr Carola Lorea
CHAIR
CHAIR
CHAIR
Dr Sylvia Huwaë
SEMINAR
Dr Chand Somaiah
Assoc Prof Maitrii Aung-Thwin CHAIR FROM 1 JUL 2021
Dr Benny Tong
Assoc Prof Maitrii Aung-Thwin
Assoc Prof Kong Chong Ho
Dr Ying Ruo Show
Dr Céline Coderey Dr Xiaorong Gu Dr Stefan Huebner
CHAIR UNTIL 30 JUN 2021
Dr Matthew Wade
Ms Minghua Tay
Dr Yuanhao Zhao
Ms Valerie Yeo
Ms Saharah Abubakar
Dr Michelle Miller
Ms Clair Hurford
Assoc Prof Titima Suthiwan
SOCIAL & STAFF WELFARE
Ms Sharon Ong
Ms Minghua Tay
Dr Exequiel Cabanda
OUTREACH & STAKEHOLDER DEVELOPMENT – 2OTH ANNIVERSARY
CONFERENCE & RESEARCH GRANTS Assoc Prof Maitrii Aung-Thwin
Dr Eric Kerr
Dr Dongxin Zou
CHAIR
Prof Naoko Shimazu
CHAIR
Prof Kenneth Dean
Assoc Prof Maitrii Aung-Thwin
Assoc Prof Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho
Dr Pui Yee Liz Chee
Prof Wei-Jun Jean Yeung
Dr Yi’En Cheng
Ms Sharlene Anthony
Assoc Prof Gregory Clancey
Ms Ceron Tan
Dr Patrick Quinton-Brown
Ms Valerie Yeo
Dr Michelle Tsai Dr Echo Lei Wang Ms Clair Hurford Ms Valerie Yeo
Dr Yang Yang
CO-CHAIR
Mr Marcel Bandur Dr Wei-Yun Chung Dr Fabian Graham Dr Yi Jin Dr Hae Young Yun Dr Dan Zhang Ms Clair Hurford Ms Iole Soto
CO-CHAIR
4.0 RESEARCH PERSONNEL ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 14
4.0 RESEARCH PERSONNEL
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 15
The Asia Research Institute aims to be the hub for high-quality social science and humanities research on Asia, and attracting high quality researchers is paramount to the success of the Institute. Since 2005, ARI has brought to NUS a mix of well-established scholars and younger researchers from the region who wish to spend research time in the Institute and interact with the best in their fields. The research personnel in ARI are diverse; they vary in terms of research foci, nationalities, international experience, and duration of appointments. ARI further maintains a good balance between established scholars and those who are at the start of their promising careers. The research personnel are led by distinguished research leaders, each heading a research cluster. Most of the research leaders are tenured faculty members, part-seconded on joint appointments from their home departments in NUS, while others have been recruited after extensive international searches. The research leaders and senior research fellows provide the stability and experience necessary for implementing longer-term plans of the Institute, while other shorter-term members add agility and vibrancy to the ARI community. Postdoctoral fellows are appointed through an annual international competition. They are promising young scholars in their research fields, with ARI providing them the space, time, and intellectual environment to build up their research and publication capacities in their early career development. Outstanding performers often go on to secure tenure-track positions in NUS or other universities worldwide. Increasingly, ARI’s research staff are appointed on the basis of externally funded programmes or projects, such as those supported by the Muhammad Alagil endowment fund, the Ministry of Education Research Grants (Singapore) and the Social Science Research Council (Singapore). ARI is also increasingly hosting research staff who are self-funded, from foundations and other institutes of higher learning.
DIRECTOR
DEPUTY DIRECTOR
Bunnell, Tim Professor PhD (Nottingham), BA (Hons) (Nottingham)
Aung-Thwin, Maitrii Associate Professor PhD (Michigan), BA (Northern Illinois)
Director and Asian Urbanisms Research Leader since 1 Jul 2021. Inter-Asia Engagements Cluster Research Leader from 1 Jul 2019 to 30 Jun 2021; joint appointment with Department of Geography, FASS. Human geography of cities and regions; transnational urbanism; urban aspirations and futures in Southeast Asia.
Deputy Director since 1 Jul 2019; joint appointment with Departments of History and Comparative Asian Studies, FASS. Myanmar/Southeast Asian history; social movements; knowledge production; community; social-legal studies; development studies; Buddhist infrastructure in South and Southeast Asia.
RESEARCH LEADERS Clancey, Gregory Kevin Associate Professor PhD (MIT), MA (Boston), BA (Hons) (Bates) Science, Technology, and Society Cluster Research Leader since 1 Aug 2009; joint appointment with Department of History, FASS. History and anthropology of science and technology; architecture and cities; natural disaster; Japan. Davidson, Jamie S Associate Professor PhD (Washington), MA (London), BA (Penn) Identities Cluster Research Leader since 1 Jul 2021; joint appointment with Department of Political Science, FASS. Comparative politics of Southeast Asia; ethnic violence; infrastructure politics; rice politics; indigenous peoples movements. Dean, Kenneth Professor PhD (Stanford), MA (Stanford), BA (Brown) Religion and Globalisation Cluster Research Leader since 1 Jan 2016; joint appointment with Department of Chinese Studies, FASS, and concurrently Department Head, since 2 Jan 2015. Transnational trust and temple networks linking Singapore Chinese temples to Southeast China and Southeast Asia. Ho, Kong Chong Associate Professor PhD (Chicago), MA (NUS), BA (Singapore) Asian Urbanisms Cluster Research Leader from 1 Jul 2018 to 30 Jun 2021; joint appointment with Department of Sociology, FASS. Political economy of cities; urban communities; higher education and youth. Shimazu, Naoko Professor PhD (Oxford), MPhil (Oxford), BA (Hons) (Manitoba) Inter-Asia Engagements Cluster Research Leader since 1 Jul 2021; joint appointment with Yale-NUS College as Professor of Humanities (History); Associate Dean of Faculty (Faculty Development) until Jun 2021; Honorary Professor, Department of
4.0 RESEARCH PERSONNEL
4.0 RESEARCH PERSONNEL
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 16
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 17
History, NUS. Global history of Asia; cultural history of global diplomacy; social and cultural history of modern societies at war; new approaches to the study of empire; oral histories of COVID-19. Yeoh, Brenda Saw Ai FBA Raffles Professor of Social Sciences PhD (Oxford), MA (Cambridge), BA (Hons) (Cambridge) Asian Migration Cluster Research Leader; joint appointment with Department of Geography, and concurrently Director (Humanities & Social Science Research), ODPRT, NUS. The politics of space in colonial and postcolonial cities; heritage issues and tourism studies; cosmopolitanism and highly skilled talent migration; gender, social reproduction and care migration; migration. Yeung, Wei-Jun Jean Professor PhD (Alberta), MA (Illinois State), BA (Soochow) Changing Family in Asia Cluster Research Leader from 1 Nov 2011 to 31 Dec 2021; joint appointment with Department of Sociology, FASS, since 15 Jul 2008; and Co-Director of the Centre for Family and Population Research, FASS. Intergenerational studies; family and children’s well-being and policies; poverty; fatherhood; China’s economic and demographic transition.
(SENIOR) RESEARCH FELLOWS Astuti, Rini PhD (Wellington), MSc (King’s College), BA (Gadjah Mada) Research Fellow from 15 Jan 2018 to 31 May 2021. Multi-layered socio-environmental conflicts underlying peatland governance, management and degradation, local community relationships. Chambon, Michel PhD (Boston), MA (Institut Catholique de Paris), BA (Institut Catholique de Paris) Research Fellow since 8 Oct 2021. Christianity in Asia; materialisation of Christianity within Chinese households.
Cheng, Yi’En PhD (Oxford), MSocSci (NUS), BSocSci (NUS)
Lim, Samantha Shu Fang PhD (NUS), MSc (UCL), BSc (NUS)
Research Fellow since 1 Jul 2019. International student mobilities and post-pandemic futures in the Asia-Pacific.
Research Fellow since 1 Sep 2021. Aspirations of ordinary individuals in Asia, their capacities to aspire and navigational strategies; comparative urbanism.
Graham, Fabian PhD (SOAS), MPhil (Cambridge), MA (National Chengchi) Research Fellow since 17 Dec 2018. Anthropology of Chinese religion; new ethnographic, narrational and analytical approaches to the study of religious phenomena. Gu, Xiaorong PhD (NUS), MA (Sun Yat-sen), BA (Hunan) Research Fellow from 1 Apr 2019 to 30 Jun 2021. Social consequences of China’s economic reform through the lens of family changes. Hertzman, Emily Zoe PhD (Toronto), MA (British Columbia), BA (British Columbia) Research Fellow since 9 Dec 2021. Chinese Indonesian mobilities, identities, religious practices and politics. Hue, Guan Thye PhD (NTU), MA (NTU), BA (Peking) Senior Research Fellow since 1 Sep 2021. Buddhism, Taoism and Chinese popular religion in Singapore and Malaysia. Huebner, Stefan PhD (Special Distinction) (Jacobs), MA (JGU) Senior Research Fellow since 14 Jul 2020. Colonialism; modernisation; development policy; impact of regional Asian sports events established by the American YMCA on the ‘Western civilising mission’. Lam, Choy Fong Theodora PhD (NUS), MSocSci (NUS), BA (Hons) (NUS), BSocSci (Waikato) Research Fellow since 15 Feb 2019. Transnational migration; children’s geographies; gender; geographical education.
Lorea, Carola PhD (La Sapienza), MA (La Sapienza), BA (La Sapienza) Research Fellow since 1 Aug 2018. Oral traditions and popular religions in South Asia, particularly eastern India, Bangladesh and the Andaman Islands. Miller, Michelle Ann PhD (Charles Darwin), BA (Hons) (Northern Territory) Senior Research Fellow since 1 Jan 2014. Autonomy/decentralisation, democratisation and conflict management in Indonesian cities. Molho, Jérémie PhD (Angers), MA (Sciences Po), BA (Sciences Po) Research Fellow from 5 Nov 2019 to 4 Nov 2021. Comparative urban studies; cultural diversity governance; cultural and higher education policies; video-based research; globalising art markets. Purwani, Ofita PhD (Edinburgh), MA (ITS Surabaya), BA (Gadjah Mada) Research Fellow since 13 Dec 2021. Javanese built environment; Southeast Asian urbanism; traditionalism; heritage issues. Somaiah, Bittiandra Chand PhD (Macquarie), MSocSci (NUS), BA (Hons) (NUS) Research Fellow since 1 Apr 2019. Cosmopolitan-modernities; gendered migration; social reconstructions of carework; sociologies of the body.
4.0 RESEARCH PERSONNEL
4.0 RESEARCH PERSONNEL
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 18
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 19
Tran, Anh Thong PhD (ANU), MA (Eastern Mennonite), BA (Can Tho)
Chen, Ningning PhD (NUS), MA (Sun Yat-Sen), BA (Zhejiang Normal)
Research Fellow from 8 Jan 2018 to 31 May 2021. Water governance, humanenvironment interactions, and ‘state-society’ relations in natural resources management in the Mekong region.
Since 2 Jan 2019. Religion and sacred space; rurality and rural landscapes; Chinese lineage culture.
Wu, Qi PhD (NUS), MA (NUS), BA (NUS) Research Fellow since 1 Dec 2021. The transregional network of Chinese religious and charity organisations. Yun, Hae Young PhD (Minnesota), MSc (SNU), BE (Seoul)
Chiu-Shee, Colleen PhD (MIT), MS; MArch; MUD (Washington, St. Louis), BArch (Zhejiang) Since 8 Nov 2021. ‘Eco’ and ‘smart’ transitions in urban development and governance. Chung, Wei-Yun PhD (Cambridge), MA (Sheffield), BBA (National Chengchi)
Research Fellow from 2 Jul 2018 to 1 Oct 2021. Socially mixed public housing and neighbourhood environments in Singapore.
From 5 Dec 2018 to 4 Mar 2021. Workplace and familial gender relations in Chinese societies and communities, including those in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.
POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS
Huwaë, Sylvia PhD (Tilburg), MA (Radboud)
Abalos, Jeofrey PhD (ANU), MPOPS (UPPI), BS (Luzon) From 3 May 2021 to 1 Nov 2021. Population ageing; population health; marriage and cohabitation; divorce and separation.
From 2 Jan 2019 to 31 Mar 2021. Cross-cultural psychology, (intercultural) communication, and identity and group processes.
Allasiw, Doreen PhD (Tokyo), MS (Tokyo), BS (Benguet State)
Jin, Yi PhD (LSE), MA (Peking), BA (Peking)
On NUS Fellowship from 2 Jan 2020 to 1 Jan 2021. Ecosystem services; community-based resource governance; rural out-migration; ageing population.
Since 4 Dec 2020. Mobile vertical urbanism and the governance of the vertical city in East Asia.
Cabanda, Exequiel Camarig PhD (NTU), MA (ICU), BS (Letran)
Jung, Yoonhee PhD (Temple), MA (Buffalo, SUNY), BS (Yonsei)
Since 1 Apr 2020. Philippines-Singapore nurse migration.
Since 12 Feb 2020. Urban politics around urban sustainability planning in Asian megacities.
Chaudhuri, Ashawari PhD (MIT), MPhil (Delhi), MA (Delhi) BA (Delhi)
Lang, Natalie Koyel PhD (Göttingen), MA (SOAS), BA (Heidelberg)
Since 10 Feb 2021. History and anthropology of heat in South Asia.
From 2 Jul 2019 to 31 Mar 2021. Hinduism and urbanity in Singapore.
Larson, Erica M. PhD (Boston), BA (Carnegie Mellon)
Varigonda, Kesava Chandra PhD (NUS), MSC (NTU), BEng (NUS)
Since 10 May 2021. Indonesian university students in Singapore and their use of digital media in navigating multiple aspirations.
Since 17 Feb 2021. State-society relations; South Asian studies; geopolitics; energy studies.
Lin, Hongxuan PhD (Washington), MA (Washington), BA (Hons) (NUS) Since 10 Jan 2021. The intersection between Islam and Marxism in Indonesia.
Wade, Matthew PhD (UC Berkeley), MA (New School), BA (Indiana) From 13 Jan 2020 to 31 Mar 2021. Government, modernity and planning in Southeast Asian cities.
McCarthy, Gerard PhD (ANU), BA (Sydney)
Wang, Lei Echo PhD (NUS/King’s College), MSc (LSE), MSc (SOAS)
Since 20 Jan 2020. How multi-decade processes of economic liberalisation in Myanmar and Sri Lanka shaped social cleavages and intensified civil conflict.
From 22 Jul 2019 to 21 Jul 2021. Social enterprises and hybrid organisations, Cross-Sector Partnerships (CSPs), and the governance of the Third Sector.
Quinton-Brown, Patrick DPhil (Oxford), MPhil (Oxford), BA (Toronto)
Warburton, Eve PhD (ANU), MA (Columbia), BA (Sydney)
Since 22 Jan 2021. Theories of International Relations; human rights and humanitarianism in North-South encounters.
From 23 Jul 2019 to 22 Jul 2021. Comparative politics and political economy, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia and especially Indonesia.
Reeder, Matthew PhD (Cornell), MA (Hawai’i), AB (Bowdoin College) From 30 Jul 2019 to 14 Jul 2021. Politics of ethnic identification and intelligence collection practices from the early modern period through the 19th century in Siam. Show, Ying Ruo PhD (NUS), MA (SOAS), BA (Fudan) Since 7 Jan 2019. History and culture of Chinese religions in Southeast Asia; gender and religion; oral traditions of religious texts. Tong, Koon Fung Benny PhD (ANU), MA (NUS), BA (NUS) From 3 Jun 2019 to 23 Mar 2021. Ageing lifestyles; popular media cultures in East and Southeast Asia; the anthropology of leisure. Tsai, Michelle PhD (Cambridge), MPhil (Cambridge) From 11 Jul 2019 to 10 Oct 2021. Economic anthropology; globalisation and the political economy of capitalism; the media and consumer culture; identity politics.
Yang, Yang PhD (Colorado), MSc (LSE), BA (Humboldt State) Since 1 Jul 2019. Ethnic and religious politics; transnational religious networks; cultural development and heritage; China-Southeast Asia connections. Zhang, Dan PhD (Taiwan Tech), MA (Wuhan Tech), BA (Wuhan Tech) Since 9 Dec 2020. Reuse of heritage buildings; urban tourism; heritage tourism. Zhao, Yuanhao PhD (Ohio State), MA (Ohio State), BA (UIBE Beijing) Since 2 Feb 2021. Material culture, narratives and everyday life among Muslim minorities in China.
4.0 RESEARCH PERSONNEL
4.0 RESEARCH PERSONNEL
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 20
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 21
Zou, Dongxin PhD (Columbia), MA (Illinois), MA (BFSU), BA (BFSU)
Kerr, Eric Thomson PhD (Edinburgh), MLitt (Aberdeen), MA (Aberdeen), LLB (Aberdeen)
Since 30 Oct 2019. Modern Chinese history; PRC history; history of medicine, science, and technology; China-Middle East and North African relations.
Research Fellow since 15 Jul 2016; joint appointment with Tembusu College as Lecturer, Residential Fellow, and Director of Student Affairs. Epistemology of technology; petroleum engineering in Thailand; digital culture.
OTHER JOINT APPOINTMENTS
Shimazu, Naoko PhD (Oxford), MPhil (Oxford), BA (Hons) (Manitoba)
Chee, Pui Yee Liz PhD (NUS), MA (NUS), BA (NUS) Research Fellow since 12 Jan 2018; joint appointment with Tembusu College, NUS, as Fellow. Use of animal tissue in Chinese medicine. Coderey, Céline PhD (Provence), MA (Provence), Dipl (NALCO), MA (Lausanne), BA (Lausanne) Research Fellow since 13 Jan 2016; joint appointment with Tembusu College, NUS, as Fellow. Health field in Myanmar; therapeutic practices and health-seeking process; conceptions of health/disease. Graham, Connor PhD (Melbourne), BA (Nottingham) Research Fellow since 17 Sep 2012; joint appointment with Tembusu College, NUS, as Fellow and Director of Studies. Information systems; science, technology, and society; living and dying in the age of the Internet. Ho, Elaine Lynn-Ee PhD (UCL), BA (Hons) (NUS) Senior Research Fellow since 1 Jun 2016; joint appointment with Department of Geography, FASS, as Associate Professor, and Vice-Dean, FASS Research Division. Transnational ageing and care ethics in the Asia-Pacific; African student migration to China; border mobilities between Myanmar and China.
From 1 Jul 2019 to 30 Jun 2021; joint appointment with Yale-NUS College as Professor of Humanities (History), Associate Dean of Faculty (Faculty Development) until Jun 2021, and Honorary Professor, Department of History. Global history of Asia; cultural history of global diplomacy; social and cultural history of modern societies at war; new approaches to the study of empire; oral histories of COVID-19.
RESEARCH ASSOCIATES/ ASSISTANTS Abubakar, Saharah MA (NUS), BSocSci (Hons) (NUS)
Chong, En Ting Grace BA (Hons) (NUS)
Yeo, Si Jie Ivin MSocSci (NUS), BSocSci (Hons) (NUS)
Research Assistant since 2 Jan 2020. Integrating culture and nature in heritage conservation.
Research Assistant from 14 Sep 2020 to 10 Sep 2021. The intersection of smart urbanism and geographies of futurity.
Hurford, Clair Elizabeth BA (ANU) Research Associate since 3 Jan 2020. Material culture and Asian cities. Liew, Jian An MSc (UCL), BSocSci (Hons) (NUS)
MUHAMMAD ALAGIL DISTINGUISHED VISITING PROFESSOR IN ARABIA ASIA STUDIES Ho, Engseng Professor PhD (Chicago)
Research Associate from 1 Mar 2019 to 30 Jun 2021. Intersections between migrant mobilities, class/skills (‘middling’), race/ ethnicity (‘Chinese’) and space/place in the contexts of Singapore and London.
Since 2 Jun 2014. Arab/Muslim diasporas across the Indian Ocean, and their relations with western empires, past and present.
Martinez, Ricardo MSc (UOC), MSc (UPC), BSc (La Sapienza)
Mahbubani, Kishore PhD (Dalhousie), MA (Dalhousie), BA (Hons) (Singapore)
Research Associate since 21 Oct 2021. City networks; multilateralism; policy learning. Morais, Franchesca Rose BSocSci (Hons) (NUS)
DISTINGUISHED FELLOW
Since 1 Jul 2019. Resurgence of Asia; ASEAN; public policies in Singapore; global geopolitics and global governance. Assistant Senior Manager and Personal Assistant to Kishore Mahbubani
Research Associate since 1 Jan 2012. Social networks and resilience of divorced Malay mothers in Singapore.
Research Assistant since 1 Jul 2020. Transnational relationships, family dynamics, mobility regimes and negotiations of citizenship across migration categories.
Acedera, Kristel Anne F. MSocSci (NUS), BA (Ateneo)
Seah, Ming Yan Bertrand BSocSci (Hons) (NUS)
VISITING SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOWS
Research Associate since 1 Jan 2019. The role of communication technologies on transnational familyhood and mediated intimacies.
Research Assistant since 27 Apr 2020. Environmentalism and state-society relations in Singapore.
Muhamad Varkkey, Helena Professor PhD (Sydney), MIntS (Sydney), BComm (UPM)
Anant, Rohini MSocSci (NUS), BSocSci (NUS) Research Assistant from 4 Feb 2021 to 8 Dec 2021. Labour geographies, labour politics and migration studies, particularly in Singapore and South Asia. Bandur, Marcel MSocSci (NUS), BA (Hons) (Durham) Research Associate from 27 Mar 2018 to 16 Apr 2021. Climate change-induced crossborder displacement within Southeast Asia.
Varigonda, Kesava Chandra PhD (NUS), MSC (NTU), BEng (NUS) Research Associate from 17 Feb 2020 to 16 Feb 2021. State-society relations; South Asian studies; geopolitics; energy studies. Xue, Yiran MA (NUS), BA (Central China Normal) Research Associate since 19 Apr 2017. Chinese personalities in history of Singapore; Chinese schools, and Chinese cemeteries in Singapore.
Chan, Carol Since 1 Jul 2019
From 22 Apr 2021 to 21 Oct 2021. Political economy of transnational haze; global politics of palm oil sustainability. Sun, Xuefeng Professor PhD (Tsinghua), MA (UIR Beijing), BA (UIR Beijing) Since 20 Aug 2021. International Relations Theory; China’s foreign policy and international relations in East Asia.
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RESEARCH CLUSTERS
Each research cluster in ARI focuses on research and analysis of a particular feature of Asian society. The seven clusters serve as platforms for bringing researchers together in a collective effort to produce useful interactions. A number of scholars from other parts of NUS as well as other tertiary educational institutions in Singapore also contribute as cluster associates. They play an active role in the respective cluster workshops, conferences, and other research activities, and serve as resource persons for the Institute. In addition, although cluster activities were curbed by the COVID-19 pandemic, they nevertheless continued on virtual platforms and through working with overseas partners. The Institute continues to explore new multi-disciplinary areas of research through external funding. Three such projects that began in 2021 are Linking the Digital Humanities to Biodiversity History in Singapore and Southeast Asia that has been awarded a large Social Science Research Thematic Grant from the Social Science Research Council, Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Student Mobilities in China-Southeast Asia funded by Singapore Ministry of Education, and Cohesion, Community Care and Confidence in Singaporean Chinese Temples and Associations and Other Asian Religious Institutions funded by the Singapore Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth.
ASIAN MIGRATION
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The Asian Migration Cluster draws together research interests in a broad range of human migrations, mobilities and interconnectivities within and beyond Asia. We work on four priority research themes: •
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The second investigates the relationship between human aspiration, migration and development in Southeast Asia, with a focus on the development impact of migration in sending communities as well as the costs and risks of migration for the poor.
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The third highlights the organisation and constitution of transnational (im)mobility as a means of (re)conceptualising different mobile practices, temporalities and rationalities that characterise people on the move in Asia.
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The fourth examines the nexus between transnational migration and ageing, and gives special consideration to how care is provisioned for or provided by older adults in the context of care circulations.
CLUSTER LEADER Prof Brenda S.A. Yeoh FBA
CLUSTER MEMBERS Ms Kristel Anne Acedera Ms Rohini Anant Dr Exequiel Camarig Cabanda Dr Yi’En Cheng Assoc Prof Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho Ms Ginny Ming Hui Koh Dr Theodora Lam Mr Jian An Liew Dr Samantha Lim Ms Franchesca Rose Morais Dr Chand Somaiah
The first focuses on the material processes and discourses of globalisation and transnationalism as they intersect in Asian cities. This includes exploring new knowledge frameworks through which to understand the complex and diverse linkages between global change and transnational migration in cities of diversity.
Under these overarching themes, cluster members—through collective and individual projects—explore a range of topics including the politics of mobility and space in postcolonial contexts; cosmopolitanism and transnationalism; urban aspirations; transnational ageing and care ethics; cultural racism and co-ethnicity; education, youth and mobilities; nurse migration; migration and gendered subjectivities; intimate social relations; multiple modernities; marriage migration and transnational familyhood; the role of communication technologies; the migration industry and brokerage practices; labour politics; citizenship practices; food security; the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); migrant health and food security; plastic waste management; and COVID-19 impacts. The cluster was actively involved in several large ongoing research projects throughout the year. These include Wave 2 of Children and Migrant Parents in Southeast Asia (CHAMPSEA), Transnational Relations, Ageing and Care Ethics (TRACE), Transnationalism and Diaspora, which are reported separately, and Two Steps, Triple Wins and Bus Stops: A Comparative Analysis of Skilled Migration Systems in Canada, Germany and Singapore. The cluster was also successful in applying for several new project grants in 2021 which have either started or will begin in 2022. This includes two MOE AcRF Tier 2 grants—the Belt and Road Initiative and Student Mobilities in China-Southeast Asia [BRISM] and Plastic Waste and Women’s Household Practices in Asia and Australia [Plastics]—and a collaborative project funded by the SSHRC in Canada titled South-South Migration and Migrant Food Insecurity: Interactions, Impacts and Remedies (MiFood Project). In addition to larger projects, the cluster also undertook a range of smaller projects and pilot studies with the aim of developing larger external proposals in future years. This includes Migrant Healthcare
Workers and Infrastructures of Skill in COVID-19 Times (INFRASKILL), International Student Mobility in a Time of COVID-19: Regimes, Experiences and Aspirations (COVIDISM), and Healthcare and ‘Foodwork’ among Left-Behind Grandparents in Migrant-Sending Villages in Southeast Asia (HEALTHFOOD). More information on HEALTHFOOD can be found under the report on CHAMPSEA. The cluster also conducted two thematic workshops which were held virtually given the COVID-19 situation. The workshops brought together both senior and upcoming international scholars alongside cluster members to develop key insights and advance migration literature. The online setting meant that these workshops were accessible to a wider range of participants located all over the globe. In August 2021, the cluster hosted Sending State Regimes and International Skilled Migration: Asian Perspectives in the Age of Global Migration. The workshop brought together papers that examined sending state policies, strategies, and structures that produce and facilitate international labour migration. The workshop was organised as part of the Two Steps, Triple Wins and Bus Stops project. In November 2021, the cluster hosted its second workshop titled Contested Asian Parenting in Intra-Asia Migration. The workshop brought together scholars of Asian migration to consider what migrant parenting in Asia means for parents, families, and communities. Through empirically grounded work on migrant parenting in Asian settings, workshop participants engaged in critical discussion on a variety of issues such as global care chains, ICT use in transnational parenting and the different embodied and gendered aspects of parenting. These workshops were augmented by a series of research seminars and presentations of scholarly work. In June, the cluster organised a research seminar on Diversity in Neighbourhoods: Magnifying Glass or Cushion to Migration and Intercultural Contact by Assoc Prof Chan-Hoong Leong which looked at the impacts of Singapore’s ethnic and immigrant housing quotas and the lived environments of residential neighbourhoods through spatial big data. In July, the cluster invited Malini Sur to discuss her book titled Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border. The last research seminar for the year held in November featured work by Asst Prof Yasmin Ortiga on Migrant Healthcare Workers and Infrastructures of Skill in Singapore. As part of the ARI20 Anniversary Roundtable Series, the cluster put together a Roundtable on Migration Futures and Transnational Scholarship: Pandemic Times, Uncertain Mobilities and the End of the ‘Age of Migration’? in September. The Roundtable comprised of key migration scholars who contributed to the Handbook on Transnationalism (Yeoh & Collins, 2022). They shared their research and reflected on the future implications of COVID-19. Bringing together past and present cluster members, academic researchers, university practitioners and students, participants engaged with a diverse range of topics from stalled international mobility to xenophobia and economic nationalism.
CLUSTER ASSOCIATES Assoc Prof Kong Chong Ho Yale-NUS College FROM 1 JUL 2021
Assoc Prof Shirlena Huang Department of Geography, NUS
Asst Prof Weiqiang Lin Department of Geography, NUS
Asst Prof Sidharthan Maunaguru Department of Sociology, NUS
Asst Prof Yasmin Ortiga Singapore Management University
Assoc Prof Anju Mary Paul Yale-NUS College
Assoc Prof Eric C. Thompson Department of Sociology, NUS
Prof Gungwu Wang Department of History, NUS
Asst Prof Junjia Ye Nanyang Technological University
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PROJECT
TRANSNATIONAL RELATIONS, AGEING AND CARE ETHICS (TRACE) PROJECT MEMBERS Principal Investigator
Assoc Prof Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho Co-Principal Investigators
Assoc Prof Shirlena Huang Assoc Prof Leng Leng Thang Prof Brenda S.A. Yeoh Postdoctoral Fellows
Dr Sylvia Ang Dr Wen-Ching Ting Chang Jung Christian University
Dr Guo Zhou Sun Yat-sen University Overseas Collaborator
Dr Jenny Tuen Yi Chiu Lingnan University Research Associate/Assistant
Mr Jian An Liew Mr Vanessa Swinn-Yap
Transnational Relations, Ageing and Care Ethics (TRACE) is a project that investigates care migration in Singapore and its links to Myanmar and China, as well as in the case of Australia which experiences similar care-related migration. In this multi-sited research, we conducted interviews with seniors who are givers and recipients of care, and younger migrants who perform care work for seniors. The fieldwork in Singapore and Australia also used a combination of Qualitative methods and Geographic Information Science approaches (Qualitative GIS) to study the care-related mobility patterns of local and migrant seniors. In total, 270 persons participated in the study across the four research sites. The research was funded by the Ministry of Education’s (MOE) Academic Research Tier 2 grant from 2018-2021. Thereafter a new study on Ageing and Social Networks—informed by the Qualitative GIS methodology developed in TRACE—commenced in 2021, funded by a Social Science Research Council Thematic Grant (Type B).
PUBLICATIONS, 2021
PROJECT
CHILD HEALTH AND MIGRANT PARENTS IN SOUTH-EAST ASIA (CHAMPSEA) WAVE 2
PROJECT MEMBERS Principal Investigator
Ho, E.L.E. & Ting, W. (2021). Informality during migration, ‘conversion’ within and across national spaces: Eliciting moral ambivalence among informal brokers. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 46, 944-957. DOI: 10.1111/tran.12460
Prof Brenda S.A. Yeoh
Ho, E.L.E., Liew, J.A., Zhou, G., Chiu, T.Y., Yeoh, B.S.A. & Huang, S. (2021). Shared spaces and ‘throwntogetherness’ in later life: A qualitative GIS study of non-migrant and migrant older adults in Singapore. Geoforum 124, 132-143. DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.05.014
Research Associate/Assistant
Ting, W.-C. & Ho, E.L.E. (2021). Care circulations between Singapore and Myanmar: Balancing eldercare work abroad with care for ageing parents back home. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1-18. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2021.1873111
Research Fellows
Dr Theodora Lam Dr Chand Somaiah Ms Kristel Anne Acedera Ms Franchesca Rose Morais
CHAMPSEA is the first mixed-method longitudinal study capitalising on the complementary strengths of quantitative and qualitative research methods to investigate the multiple longer-term impacts of migrant parents’ absence on children in Southeast Asia. First launched in 2008, the research investigates the impacts of parental migration/absence on the health and well-being of pre-school (aged 3 to 5) and middle childhood (aged 9 to 11) children who stayed behind vis-à-vis those from non-migrant households in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Returning to the same Indonesian and Filipino households in 2016, and Thailand in 2019, CHAMPSEA continued to further the research on transnational migration and transnational householding by tracking, surveying and interviewing the same households where the children are now in middle childhood and young adulthood. The CHAMPSEA research team comprises the collaborative efforts of international members from Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines, Scotland, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Through the years, the project has been funded from multiple international sources including the United Kingdom (The Wellcome Trust), Singapore (Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 2), Hong Kong (General Research Fund, Research Grants Council HK), Canada (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [SSHRC] through the Gender, Migration and the Work of Care project based at Centre for Global Social Policy) and Thailand (National Research Council of Thailand [NRCT]). The ongoing collaboration has proven fruitful yet again with members of the team working together to win grants from different international sources. With Assoc Prof Lucy Jordan from the University of Hong Kong as the Principal Investigator, the team was successful in obtaining a Research Impact Fund from the Research Grants Council (RGC) in Hong Kong worth HKD 4,805,000. The three-year study titled The Longer-term Impact of Parental Labour Migration: Well-being, Indebtedness and Family Sustainability in Southeast Asia will begin in 2022. Due to extended travel restrictions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, members of the team in Singapore spent the year redesigning an earlier grant awarded by NUS Initiative to Improve Health in Asia [NIHA], Global Asia Institute, Singapore which was intended to investigate Healthcare and ‘Foodwork’ among Left-Behind Grandparents in Migrant-Sending Villages in Southeast Asia (HEALTHFOOD). Instead of conducting the study with left-behind grandparent and father caregivers in Indonesia and the Philippines, the team redirected the interview focus on Indonesian and Filipino migrant mothers working as domestic workers in Singapore and their left-behind children. Face-to-face as well as virtual interviews with both the migrant domestic workers and their children are currently ongoing.
PROJECT
CHILD HEALTH AND MIGRANT PARENTS IN SOUTH-EAST ASIA (CHAMPSEA) WAVE 2
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In addition to the more traditional interviewing method, the project team experimented with incorporating a visual food diary exercise with the children in the study by asking them to take photographs of their meals consumed over a week. The photos, alongside short descriptive captions also written by the children, are then used as visual prompts during the interview to better understand the everyday food consumption habits of children from migrant households through their own experiences and interpretations. With approximately a third of the intended interviews completed thus far, the project team has also begun transcribing and translating the interviews.
PROJECT
The year was also spent analysing both the quantitative and qualitative datasets using alternative methods, preparing and publishing new articles from the rich datasets and disseminating information from the study through online platforms and lectures.
PROJECT MEMBERS
TRANSNATIONALISM AND DIASPORA: ENHANCING DEMOGRAPHY’S CONTRIBUTION TO MIGRATION AND DEVELOPMENT
Principal Investigators
Assoc Prof Yan Tan University of Adelaide
Prof Andrew Rosser
PUBLICATIONS, 2021 Somaiah, B.C. & Yeoh, B.S.A. (2021). Temporal emotion work, gender and aspirations of left-behind youth in Indonesian migrant-sending villages. Journal of Youth Studies. DOI: 10.1080/13676261.2021.1952170 Acedera, K. & Yeoh, B.S.A. (2021). When care is near and far: Care triangles and the mediated spaces of mobile phones among Filipino transnational families. Geoforum 121, 181-191. DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.02.021
University of Melbourne
Prof Fei Guo Macquarie University
Prof Brenda S.A. Yeoh Research Fellow
Dr Theodora Lam
Transnationalism and Diaspora: Enhancing Demography’s Contribution to Migration and Development is a project that aims to promote diasporas’ contribution to both origin and destination countries. Funded by the Australian Research Council under the Discovery programme, the research undertakes four country case studies—Australia, China, Singapore and Indonesia— in order to increase understanding of the characteristics of diasporas, their international linkages, and their potential for enhancing development in origin countries. In 2019 and 2020, the Singapore team completed fieldwork and data collection for the project and begun with some preliminary analyses of the qualitative interviews conducted. The in-depth interviews revealed that respondents often had to sustain familial relationships across national boundaries, and that these relationships often influenced their migration decisions and plans for the future. Members of diasporas who were separated from their families often relied on frequent visits ‘back home’ and several respondents shared their plans to eventually reunite with their families. Given the travel curtailments brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, the research team in Singapore decided to design a follow-up study in 2021 to uncover the impacts of the pandemic on members of diasporas and their families, and how their cross-border relationships have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and its related travel restrictions.
Research Associate/Assistants
Ms Kellynn Wee Ms Rohini Anant Ms Franchesca Rose Morais
The new COVID-19 centred fieldwork involves conducting follow-up in-depth interviews with members of diasporas previously interviewed in Singapore and additional in-depth interviews with their family. Members of the team spent the year developing the research method for the follow-up study, updating existing aide memoires and designing sampling frames. In order to reconstruct respondents’ migration trajectories and emulate the idea of ‘following’ respondents on their migration journeys, the interviews will also be conducted using a new research method combining geospatial technologies and biographical interviews. While participants narrate their migration stories and experiences, each location where a participant had lived will be entered and searched in chronological order in Google Earth to ‘visit’ these locations virtually on a laptop screen during the interview process. In December 2021, the team began a first set of interviews with five Indonesian respondents living in Singapore. The team will continue conducting fieldwork throughout 2022.
PUBLICATION, 2021 Wee, K. & Yeoh, B.S.A. (2021). Serial migration, multiple belongings and orientations toward the future: The perspective of middle-class migrants in Singapore. Journal of Sociology 57 (1), 94-110. https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783320960521
ASIAN URBANISMS
CLUSTER LEADER Prof Tim Bunnell
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The Asian Urbanisms Cluster explores Asia’s diverse urban experiences historically, contemporaneously, and toward the future. It seeks to contribute to theory and applied research on city life and wider urban processes from local to global scales, in diverse contexts in Asia, and through comparative studies with other world regions. The orientation of the cluster is towards research that speaks in transformative ways to urban-related theories, debates and public policy issues in and beyond Asia.
Third, on 23 and 24 September 2021, Jérémie Molho and Dan Zhang co-organised the online conference Cultural Heritage, Digitalisation and Urban Diversity in Asia. The conference brought together academics and government officials to advance reflection on the opportunities and challenges that new technologies represent for heritage. Two special issues on heritage digitalisation are being planned for publication from work presented (virtually) over the two days.
In mid-2021, Tim Bunnell resumed leadership of the cluster, taking over from Kong Chong Ho, who had led the cluster since March 2018. While the emphasis of this leadership transition was on intellectual continuity rather than radical reinvention, Asian Urbanisms has been streamlined around three main strands of urban research:
Among the host of smaller-scale Asian Urbanisms events during the course of the year was a virtual roundtable organised as part of ARI’s 20th anniversary celebration. Held on 12 October, Asian Urbanisms: Critical Reflections and New Directions assembled three former cluster members whose post-ARI research career pathways have engaged a wide range of urban questions and involved highly varied degrees of engagement with worlds of policy and praxis: Eli Elinoff (Victoria University of Wellington), Limin Hee (Centre for Liveable Cities), and Nausheen Anwar (Karachi Urban Lab). More than a hundred participants tuned into the online event from around the world, including many former cluster members and international research collaborators.
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Urban heritage and the vernacular city: built environment; intangible heritage; urban culture and ways of life
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City futures: plans, models, ‘solutions’ and visions; the (post) pandemic city; eco/green, inclusive and digital/smart urbanisms; the city and global governance
FROM 1 JUL 2021
Assoc Prof Kong Chong Ho UNTIL 30 JUN 2021
CLUSTER MEMBERS Mr Marcel Bandur Dr Colleen Chiu-Shee Dr Yi Jin Dr Natalie Lang Dr Ricardo Martinez Dr Jérémie Molho Dr Ofita Purwani Dr Matthew Wade Dr Echo Lei Wang Prof Brenda S.A. Yeoh Dr Hae Young Yun Dr Dan Zhang
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Global urban frontiers: extended/planetary urbanisation (oceanic as well as territorial); infrastructures of connectivity; new geographies of urban theory
Cluster members organised three major international conference events during 2021. The first, Urban Religion, Gender and the Body, held on 25-27 January, was organised by Natalie Lang. Combining urban studies perspectives with the interests of the Religion and Globalisation Cluster, this conference took the gendered body as a lens of analysis for the study of the relation between religion and the city. The online event involved an innovative format by facilitating two weeks of multimedia conversations followed by three days of live panel discussions. The papers (which are now under review as part of two journal special issues) showed how religious minority experiences and religious rituals co-construct the city through spatial claims, bodily experiences, and urban memories. The cluster’s second major event of the year, Building City Knowledge from Neighbourhoods was held on 11-12 March, and involved collaboration with the Southeast Asia Neighbourhood Network (SEANNET) of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS). The organisers (Kong Chong Ho, Rita Padawangi, Hae Young Yun and Paul Rabé) have selected eight of the presented papers to appear in a special issue of Asia Pacific Viewpoint which will be published in 2022. In addition to this special issue, Kong Chong Ho, Hae Young Yun, and Kim Jeehun (Inha University, South Korea, former Visiting Senior Research Fellow) extended their own workshop presentation material on Korean expatriate families in Hanoi for a separate paper which will be published in a special issue of Korea Journal on ‘Korean Diaspora in the Global South’.
Cluster alumni were also centre stage as authors of books in two well-attended virtual book launch events: Sonic City: Making Rock Music and Urban Life in Singapore (NUS Press) by Steve Ferzacca; and The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanization of Rural China (University of Minnesota Press), by Nick R. Smith. In terms of research grant activity, the highlight of the year was the MOE AcRF Tier 2 funding for a three-year project titled Belt and Road Initiative and Student Mobilities in China-Southeast Asia awarded to Kong Chong Ho (as PI; co-PI Brenda Yeoh). Kong Chong Ho and Jérémie Molho also secured substantial UParis-NUS funding for a project titled Governing Diverse Cities in Europe and Asia. Work on an HSS Seed Fund (Collaborative Research) grant concerning the planning of new capital cities in Southeast Asia included development of a new Whitepaper application for AcRF Tier 2 funding (PI, Daniel Goh; co-PI Tim Bunnell). Further achievements of individual cluster members include an article on land and housing in Singapore by Kong Chong Ho that was published in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology. He also co-authored an article on international student mobilities that was published in Geographical Research. Articles by Tim Bunnell were published in Urban Geography, Urban Studies, and Asia-Pacific Viewpoint. The last of those arose from a workshop on BRI as Method that ARI organised in collaboration with the Max Weber Foundation research group on Borders, Mobility and New Infrastructures.
CLUSTER ASSOCIATES Prof Tim Bunnell Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, NUS UNTIL 30 JUN 2021
Prof Stephen Cairns Future Cities Lab, Singapore-ETH Centre
Assoc Prof Lilian Chee Department of Architecture, NUS
Assoc Prof Im Sik Cho Department of Architecture, NUS
Dr Jess Nicole Clendenning Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich FROM 1 JUL 2021
Assoc Prof Daniel Goh Department of Sociology, NUS
Assoc Prof Kong Chong Ho Yale-NUS College FROM 1 JUL 2021
Prof Jane M. Jacobs Yale-NUS College
Assoc Prof Kah-Wee Lee Department of Architecture, NUS
Dr Ricardo Martinez Independent Researcher UNTIL 20 OCT 2021
Dr Michelle Miller Asia Research Institute, NUS
Dr Jérémie Molho European University Institute FROM 5 NOV 2021
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Colleen Chiu-Shee is lead author of an article titled ‘Ending gated communities: The rationales for resistance in China’ that was published in Housing Studies. She also co-organised a roundtable session ‘International Impact of U.S. Planning Education—The Case of Mainland Chinese Students’ at the Annual Conference of Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning which has resulted in two manuscripts for submission to the Journal of Planning Education and Research. In addition to the conference and workshop outputs already noted above, Natalie Lang published a monograph with Berghahn Books titled Religion and Pride: Hindus in Search of Recognition in La Réunion. Hae Young Yun published an article on neighbourhood walking and the health of lower-income older adults in Sustainability. Jérémie Molho and Dan Zhang are respectively leading the editing of forthcoming special issues of the International Journal of Heritage Studies and the Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development from their collaborative conference on the digitalisation of urban heritage. Jérémie Molho was also part of a team that edited a special issue of the journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power on managing cultural identity in cities of the global South. Ricardo Martinez was lead author of an article on global urban governance that that was published in the journal Urban Geography. He presented further work on Seoul and the transnational promotion of its water governance at the Institute of Water Policy, NUS and at the EADI ISS Conference 2021: Solidarity, Peace and Social Justice.
CLUSTER ASSOCIATES Dr Kok Hoe Ng Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS
Assoc Prof Rita Padawangi Singapore University of Social Sciences
Assoc Prof Choon-Piew Pow Department of Geography, NUS UNTIL 22 JUL 2021
Asst Prof Justin D. Stern Yale-NUS College
Dr Shaun Teo Department of Geography, NUS FROM 27 SEP 2021
Dr Echo Lei Wang Independent Researcher FROM 23 JUL 2021
Dr Hae Young Yun Independent Researcher FROM 2 OCT 2021
Finally, Yi Jin published the article ‘Informalising formality: The construction of penghuqu in an urban redevelopment project in China’ in the journal Housing Studies. Another article titled ‘The informal constitution of state centrality: Governing street businesses in (post-)pandemic Chengdu, China’ has been accepted for publication by the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
CHANGING FAMILY IN ASIA
CLUSTER LEADER Prof Wei-Jun Jean Yeung
CLUSTER MEMBERS Dr Jeofrey Abalos Dr Wei-Yun Chung Dr Xiaorong Gu
The Changing Family in Asia Cluster, one of the oldest clusters in ARI established in 2003, came to a close at the end of 2021. In this final year, cluster members continued to actively organise and participate in international conferences via online platforms and yielded an impressive volume of research output in multiple venues and multiple formats of international prestige and global reach. In January 2021, Jean Yeung, Benny Tong, and Leng Leng Thang brought together research from across Asia in the conference Leisure for Older Adults in Asia, to broaden the current understanding of the intersection between leisure and ageing in the region. This conference took a holistic approach of examining leisure engagements by older participants in Asia (55 years old and above), the socio-economic and cultural factors that influence their leisure lifestyles (e.g., family structures and relationships, class, ethnicity, region, etc.), and the implications and effects leisure participation has on both participants and their socio-economic and cultural environments. Presentations provided insights into ageing and leisure in Asian countries such as China, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore and Sri Lanka. The conference attracted a wide audience via the digital platform Zoom and witnessed lively engagements of scholars and the general audience in discussing emerging trends and phenomena. A special issue based on selected papers presented in this conference will be published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology.
Dr Benny Tong Prof Brenda S. A. Yeoh
In October, for the ARI20 Anniversary Roundtable Series in celebration of ARI’s 20th anniversary, the cluster brought together its alumni and current researchers in an online conference to contribute to dialogues on issues regarding Asian families with cutting edge research on the unprecedented changes in the area of marriage and fertility, family types, gender and intergenerational relations, and rapid population ageing. The cluster had two cluster leaders since its inception, Prof Gavin Jones (2003-2010) and Prof Jean Yeung (2010-2021). The two-day conference also commemorated the cluster’s achievements and legacy and reflected on ARI’s contributions to the achievements of the cluster’s alumni. Founding Cluster Leader Prof Gavin Jones delivered a keynote speech. Alumni who presented included Cheryll Alipio, Yingchun Ji, You Yenn Teo, Premchand Dommaraju and Maznah Mohamad, to name a few. The cluster also organised several seminars this year. In March, Prof Yunxiang Yan from the University of California, LA delivered a talk titled ‘The Triumph of Chinese Statism in Family Policy-Making’. Prof Yan explored the Chinese state’s logic and behaviour pattern in family policy-making from a historical perspective. He highlighted that in numerous ways and during different periods, a statist approach that is at odds with traditional familism and modern individualism is employed in the making of family policies and in the reshaping of the Chinese family. In June, cluster member and research fellow Xiaorong Gu gave a seminar titled ‘Sacrifice and Indebtedness: The Intergenerational Contract in Chinese Rural Migrant Families’.
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She proposed the concept of intergenerational contract as an analytical tool for looking at the resilience and vulnerabilities of migrant families in negotiating economic production and social reproduction across geographic spaces and against institutional constraints.
CLUSTER ASSOCIATES Assoc Prof Angelique Chan Department of Sociology, NUS
Asst Prof Vincent Chua Department of Sociology, NUS
Dr Wei-Yun Chung Independent Researcher FROM 25 FEB TO 30 JUN 2021
Assoc Prof Premchand Dommaraju
This year also marked the publication of several special issues in reputable journals. In March, Jean Yeung and Yeonjin Lee published the special issue ‘Aging in East Asia: New Findings on Retirement, Health, and Well-Being’ in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, DOI: 10.1093/geronb/gbab055. In April, Xiaorong Gu published two special issues: ‘The Value of Children and Social Transformations in Asia’ in Child Indicators Research (vol. 14, issue 2), and ‘The Value Turn in Childhood Sociology’ in Current Sociology (DOI: 10.1177/00113921211006102). Each comprises a collection of papers presented at the ARI conference The Value of Children in Asia: Family and Public Policies, held in November 2018. In October, Jean Yeung, Sonia Drobnič, and Wei-Yun Chung published the special issue ‘Family Policies and Care Regimes in Asia’ in International Journal of Social Welfare (vol. 30, issue 4). The collection of papers in the issue was from ARI workshop Family Policies in Asia, held in November 2019. A special issue based on the ARI conference held in November 2020, Emerging Dimensions of Marriage in Asia convened by Jean Yeung and Gavin Jones, is forthcoming in the Journal of Family Issues.
Nanyang Technological University
Dr Xiaorong Gu Independent Researcher FROM 1 JUL TO 31 DEC 2021
Prof Gavin Jones Independent Researcher
Asst Prof Erin Hye-Won Kim Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS
Assoc Prof Maznah Mohamad Department of Malay Studies, NUS
Assoc Prof Bussarawan Teerawichitchainan Department of Sociology, NUS
Assoc Prof You Yenn Teo Nanyang Technological University
Assoc Prof Leng Leng Thang Department of Japanese Studies, NUS
Dr Benny Tong Ministry of Social and Family Development FROM 1 APR TO 30 JUN 2021
Dr Mui Teng Yap Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS
These are the last of the 16 Special Issues published by the Changing Family in Asia Cluster since 2013, many in leading journals in the field of demography, ageing, family studies, and public policy including the Journal of Marriage and Family, Journal of Family Issues, Social Science and Medicine, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Demographic Research, The Journals of Gerontology, Aging and Health and so on. Many other books and journal articles were published as well. Over the years, the cluster has created a substantial body of new knowledge on families in Asia and has received high recognition from the research community internationally and regionally. Today, the cluster’s alumni are scattered in almost all continents, in the US, Europe, Australia, and of course in Asia, particularly in Singapore, occupying key positions in leading universities. This is a testimony of the cluster’s and ARI’s success in training and mentoring the next generation of scholars on family research.
IDENTITIES
CLUSTER LEADER Assoc Prof Jamie S. Davidson FROM 1 JUL 2021
CLUSTER MEMBERS Dr Sylvia Huwaë Dr Patrick Quinton-Brown Dr Michelle Tsai Dr Eve Warburton Dr Yuanhao Zhao
Identities is ARI’s latest research cluster beginning in 2017. It examines identities in Asia from different perspectives and disciplines, explores the origins of identities, and traces how they are created, sustained and modulate over time and across space. The effects they generate in culture, politics and society is also of interest. The cluster is open to various theoretical, conceptual and methodological approaches and empirical work on ethnicity, race, gender, religion, age, nation and class, among others. Jamie Davidson of the Department of Political Science, NUS assumed the headship of the cluster in mid-2021. He was an ARI Postdoctoral Fellow from 2002-2003 before clusters were even introduced. In connection with celebrations of ARI’s 20th anniversary, in September 2021, the cluster held a lively online symposium called Identities in Asia: Past, Present and Future Directions. The roundtable provided a welcoming forum for esteemed panellists to reflect on and situate their own personal and professional histories and identities within the body of identities research in Asia. Chaired by Jamie Davidson, panellists included acclaimed senior scholars of identities in Asia: Srirupa Roy (University of Göttingen), Peter A. Jackson (The Australian National University), and Ien Ang (Western Sydney University). The event was attended by over 140 virtual guests, some of whom challenged the panellists with insightful and probing questions. In January 2022, the cluster hosted an invited lecture by Prof Tim Winter of The University of Western Australia. His incisive and wide-ranging talk was titled, ‘Reviving the Silk Roads, a New Geocultural Politics of Identity’. In it Prof Winter discussed China’s revival of the Silk Roads in the context of a new geocultural politics of identity-making and contestation. The well-attended talk was chaired by Cluster Associate Sabina Insebayeva. Patrick Quinton-Brown, one of the cluster’s two Postdoctoral Fellows, published a peer-reviewed journal article in International Relations and completed a second piece, currently under review. In March 2021, he organised and presented a paper at Conceptual Vocabularies and the Bandung Spirit, a two-day, virtual workshop in collaboration with Robbie Shilliam (Johns Hopkins University), Quỳnh Phạm (University of San Francisco), and Naoko Shimazu (Yale-NUS College and ARI). He also presented an additional working paper at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. At the end of the year Patrick contributed an inaugural policy brief titled ‘A southern conception of “sovereignty as responsibility”’ for ARI’s Asia Peace Programme, to be published in early 2022; it focused on Southern-Northern conceptions of responsible sovereignty and humanitarian protection. Throughout he has been working on his book manuscript soon to be reviewed by a major university press. Patrick’s manuscript, tentatively titled Intervention/Non-Intervention: Southern Protest and the Globalization of International Society, was one of two selected out of seven highquality submissions to be presented at the FASS-ARI Book Manuscript Workshops to be held in 2022. Patrick will invite leading scholars in
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his field to provide in-depth commentary on his draft manuscript. Postdoctoral Fellow Yuanhao Zhao co-authored a chapter titled ‘Monster for COVID struggle: The life of a Japanese Yōkai from prophecy to expression’ for the book project derived from ARI’s blog, CoronAsur: Asian Religions in the Covidian Age, that will be published by The University of Hawai’i Press. His peer-reviewed article, ‘Rejuvenated by goddess of memory – of narrative and identity’, has been accepted by the journal Western Folklore. He is currently revising his manuscript for publication. Its preliminary title is ‘Around the dead men we gather: Negotiating Muslim-ness in China through death-related folklore’. Zhao also published a feature blog post for ARIscope titled ‘Representing ethnic identity through material culture — The Hui people and their ‘tang ping’ pitcher’ in April 2021. In May, he gave an invited talk on Performance Theory by Prof Suga Yutaka at The University of Tokyo to graduate students of folkloristic studies. He also co-organised a panel at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society and presented his ongoing project ‘Muddy dogs in struggle: Discourses, practices and networks’. Lastly, he conducted fieldwork in China’s Muslim communities in Shanghai and Jinan in spite of the difficulties brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. Cluster Associate Amit Julka published the article ‘Gendered honor: How mass common sense shaped India’s foreign policy in Jammu and Kashmir, 1947–1950’ published in the Global Studies Quarterly Journal. Based on the analysis of popular texts such as films, folk literature, and print media, the paper analyses the role played by mass notions of gender and honour in shaping India’s intervention at the start of the Kashmir conflict. Amit also became the co-founder of a multilingual podcast called Mitti Pao on South Asian culture and politics. The podcast aims to keep the ‘state’ aside, and let the people do the talking. He also published an article on the politics of the memorialisation of the partition of India in the Punjabi literary magazine Baranmah. Two of his Urdu to English translations will be part of upcoming anthologies, titled Speaking Silence: Writings by Indian Muslim Women (Oxford University Press) and Medical Maladies: Quarantine and Other Short Stories (Niyogi Books) respectively. Amit is currently working as a Postdoctoral Fellow (Teaching) at the NUS Department of Political Science, where he is teaching two modules—Social Theory & International Relations, and South Asian Politics. Lastly, Amit has been hired by the Department of International Relations at Ashoka University (India) as Assistant Professor (Tenure-Track).
Sabina Insebayeva published a co-authored peer-reviewed journal article titled ‘The power of ambiguity: National symbols, nation building and political legitimacy in Kazakhstan’ in Europe-Asia Studies. She also won two research grants from Georg Eckert Institute & The Marga und Kurt Möllgaard Foundation (Germany) and Matsushita Konosuke Foundation (Japan). Sabina was also invited to give several talks, including at the George Washington University, Fudan University, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Nazarbayev University and Caspian Policy Center (Washington D.C.). She organised three events held at ARI in 2021: (i) Identity Politics and Foreign Policy: Non-Western Perspectives, which involved a panel of three speakers, Prof Bahar Rumelili (Koç University), Prof Wojczewski (King’s College London), and Prof Yinan He (Lehigh University), (ii) a seminar presentation given by Prof Tim Winter (University of Western Australia), and (iii) a guest lecture by Prof Bahar Rumelili (Koç University). In 2021 cluster member Sylvia Huwaë, who later became Cluster Associate, worked on two papers. The first, ‘Perceived identities and psychological threat following exclusion in Singapore and the Netherlands’, focused on the effect of exclusion (relative to inclusion) on the perceived personal identity and group identity of people in Singapore and in the Netherlands. Using the Cyberball game, both excluded Singaporeans and Dutchmen reported more self-esteem threat and more belongingness threat than those who were included. Sylvia’s second paper, titled ‘Self-reliance and relationship value as social motives of excluded Singaporeans and Dutchmen to approach or avoid their transgressors: A between and withincultural comparison’, seizes on differences and/or similarities between excluded Singaporeans and excluded Dutchmen in selffocused motives (being less vs more self-reliant) and relationship motives (highly vs hardly valuing the relationship) to approach or avoid their transgressor. It was also examined which of these two motives were more endorsed within both. Both manuscripts will be submitted to peer-reviewed journals shortly. The cluster will welcome three new Research Fellows in 2022. Aparna Nambiar, a recent PhD graduate from The University of California-Berkeley, will be working on contemporary dance and ethnic identity in Singapore. Kelzang Tashi, a recent PhD graduate in Anthropology from The Australian National University, will conduct research on the intersection between matrilineal systems and Buddhism in Bhutan. Finally, Mark Stanford, a PhD graduate in Anthropology, of the London School of Economics and Political Science, is interested in religious group and identity formation in Southeast Asia from a macro-perspective.
CLUSTER ASSOCIATES Assoc Prof Ja Ian Chong Department of Political Science, NUS
Assoc Prof Jamie S. Davidson Department of Political Science, NUS UNTIL 30 JUN 2021
Dr Saroja Dorairajoo Department of Sociology, NUS
Dr Siao Yuong Fong Independent Researcher
Dr Courtney Fu Department of Communications and New Media, NUS FROM 3 FEB 2021
Dr Sylvia Huwaë Independent Researcher FROM 1 APR 2021
Dr Sabina Insebayeva Independent Researcher FROM 1 APR 2021
Dr Amit Julka Independent Researcher
Asst Prof Laavanya Kathiravelu Nanyang Technological University
Assoc Prof Chris McMorran Department of Japanese Studies, NUS FROM 3 FEB 2021
Asst Prof Pei Pei Setoh Nanyang Technological University
Asst Prof Risa J. Toha Yale-NUS College
Dr Eve Warburton Independent Researcher FROM 23 JUL 2021
Assoc Prof Lanjun Xu Department of Chinese Studies, NUS
INTER-ASIA ENGAGEMENTS
CLUSTER LEADER Prof Naoko Shimazu FROM 1 JUL 2021 Prof Tim Bunnell UNTIL 30 JUN 2021
CLUSTER MEMBERS Dr Rini Astuti Mr Marcel Bandur Dr Jorge Bayona Prof Engseng Ho Dr Stefan Huebner Mr Ricardo Martinez Dr Gerard McCarthy Dr Michelle Miller Dr Helena Muhamad Varkkey Dr Andrew Ong Dr Matthew Reeder Prof Naoko Shimazu Dr Xuefeng Sun Dr Anh Thong Tran Dr Yang Yang Mr Si Jie Ivin Yeo
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Under the leadership of Prof Tim Bunnell, the Inter-Asia Engagements (IAE) Cluster successfully completed the three-year cycle cluster review in June 2021. Prof Naoko Shimazu took over the cluster leadership from July 2021 with an initial appointment of three years. Prof Shimazu is a global historian of Asia, and holds a joint appointment as Professor of Humanities (History) at Yale-NUS College, and Honorary Professor at the NUS Department of History. Under her leadership, IAE continues to strengthen a research culture which is diverse and innovative—looking for unexpected synergies, inspiring experimental ideas, and generating creativity in Asia Research. As the largest cluster in ARI, IAE hosts a number of different thematic areas at any one time. In 2021, IAE hosted two research grant projects on the environment—the Transboundary Environmental Commons in Southeast Asia (TECSEA), headed by Prof David Taylor, as well as a new SSRTG Type A titled Linking the Digital Humanities to Biodiversity History in Singapore and Southeast Asia with Anthony Medrano (Cluster Associate and Assistant Professor at Yale-NUS College) as PI and Stefan Huebner as Co-PI. An intracluster collaboration on Living with COVID-19 in Southeast Asia: Personal and Visual Experiences of the Pandemic continued to develop under Gerard McCarthy, Yang Yang, and Naoko Shimazu. Another theme of the cluster is infrastructures—Prof James Sidaway (Cluster Associate, Department of Geography) convenes the Max Weber Foundation Research Group on Borders, Mobility and New Infrastructures, and co-authored a peer-reviewed article, ‘Theorising from the Belt and Road Initiative’ in Asia Pacific Viewpoint (26 October 2021, DOI: 10.1111/apv.12322) with Shaun Lin and Naoko Shimazu who are also members of the Max Weber group. Yang Yang also contributed to the BRI project. The Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Visiting Professorship Programme did not hold its annual conference in 2021 due to COVID. Naoko Shimazu chaired the Outreach and Stakeholder Development Committee established to coordinate and implement a programme celebrating ARI’s 20th anniversary in 2021. In the special roundtable series named the ARI20 Anniversary Roundtable Series, IAE contributed two distinct roundtable panels: one on ‘Oceanic Asia: Global History, Japanese Waters, and the Edges of Area Studies’ organised by Stefan Huebner, and another on ‘Representing Disasters from the Inside Out’ on the effects of the 2004 Tsunami on Banda Aceh organised by Prof Isaac Kerlow. Naoko participated as the cluster leader in the finale roundtable ‘ARI and Asian Futures in Humanities and Social Sciences Research’ in November 2021. Senior Research Fellow Stefan Huebner published an article on floating dwellings in a climate change and sea level context in Modern Asian Studies. A second article on the origins of offshore oil drilling in Asia and the United States is forthcoming in Journal of Global History. Two short articles on the Earth’s amphibious
transformation and on the new German government’s China policy were published in AsiaGlobal Online. Stefan Huebner also served as advisor and interview partner for the Hi, Asian Games documentary series currently being produced by the Hangzhou Asian Games (2022) organising committee and the Olympic Council of Asia. He is also Principal Investigator of digital humanities project Advancing Digital Humanities Research into Singapore’s Epidemic, Environmental, and Urban History (Co-PI, Kenneth Dean of Religion and Globalisation Cluster) which was finalised and will be made fully accessible through the NUS Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Portal in 2022. Postdoctoral Fellow Matthew Reeder was the lead grant writer for the successful MOE Tier-2 grant application, Archiving the Underclasses: Knowledge, Law, and Everyday Agency in Modern Southeast Asia, with Maitrii Aung-Thwin (ARI Deputy Director) as the PI, to begin in February 2022. His article, ‘Crafting a categorical Ayutthaya: Ethnic labeling, administrative reforms, and social organisation in an early modern entrepôt’, has been accepted for publication in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient in early 2022. He co-convened with Clay Eaton and Yang Yang the IAE’s cluster-level conference at ARI, Managing the Cosmopolitan City: Inter-Asian Strategies of Ethnic Administration, Past and Present. A special issue incorporating seven papers from the conference will be published in Asian Ethnicity in 2023. Matthew Reeder was appointed as Assistant Professor of Humanities (History) at Yale-NUS College to commence in July 2022. Postdoctoral Fellow Gerard McCarthy finalised his book manuscript for publication with Cornell University Press, in addition to working on a number of projects on Myanmar and Southeast Asia. In early 2021 Gerard oversaw the indexing and coding of transcripts from Round 1 of the Living with COVID-19 in Southeast Asia: Personal and Visual Experiences of the Pandemic project; and in late 2021 he helped to secure the funding and methodology for Round 2 interviews. In 2021, he developed a new research project on the political economy of platform capitalism in Southeast Asia, receiving an internal seed grant. Of note, he was appointed as Co-Chair of the Mainland Southeast Asia Study Group in late 2021. He presented at a range of public events and conferences, including leading disciplinary conferences (American Political Science Association, Development Studies Association, Myanmar Burma Update Conference) and a series of seminars and panels on the Myanmar coup and its consequences. Postdoctoral Fellow Yang Yang collaborated with Tim Bunnell on the China Made project at the University of Colorado in Boulder and the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto, to co-convene an international, interdisciplinary workshop titled The Social Life of Chinese Infrastructures in Southeast Asia in May 2021. Yang Yang also co-organised a workshop titled Seasons of Revolutions: Transnational Lives of Nationalist Revolts with
CLUSTER ASSOCIATES Dr Rini Astuti Australian National University FROM 1 JUN 2021
Dr Clay Eaton Yale-NUS College
Prof Isaac Kerlow Art-Science-Media
Dr Nyi Nyi Kyaw Independent Researcher
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Ameem Lutfi (MEI), Nisha Mathew (Mahindra University), and Serkan Yolacan (Stanford University), which examined the roles of highly mobilised actors in transnational revolutionary moments in the 20th and 21st centuries. Yang Yang published an article in Asia Pacific Viewpoint on the multiple geographies of knowledge production in academic research on China’s Belt and Road initiatives, and contributed a piece to the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy’s special blog series titled Transformations: Downstream Effects of the BRI, on the gendered discourse of China’s Silk Road heritage and its implications to Muslim communities. She also played a key role in the Living with COVID-19 in Southeast Asia project.
PROJECT
Postdoctoral Fellow Jorge Bayona joined the cluster in October 2021, upon receiving his PhD in History from the University of Washington, Seattle. His research focuses on transregional convergences and parallels within Southeast Asia and between Southeast Asia and Latin America. He has submitted final revisions on a book chapter to be published in Peru and sent out an article for peer review in TRaNS. He also presented some of his research in the ARI-organised conference Seasons of Revolutions: Transnational Lives of Nationalist Revolts at an event organised by the Institut Français d’Études Andines, and will soon participate in the LASA/Asia conference Rethinking Trans-Pacific Ties: Asia and Latin America, organised by the Latin American Studies Association.
Principal Investigator
Dr Ameem Lutfi Middle East Institute, NUS
Dr Nisha Mathew Independent Researcher
Asst Prof Anthony Medrano Yale-NUS College
Dr Swapna Kona Nayudu Independent Researcher
Asst Prof Canay Ozden-Schilling Department of Sociology, NUS FROM 9 DEC 2021
Dr Matthew Reeder Yale-NUS College FROM 15 JUL 2021
Assoc Prof Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario
In 2021, the cluster hosted Visiting Senior Research Fellows Xuefeng Sun, who is Professor of International Relations and the Executive Deputy Dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University, and Helena Muhamad Varkkey who is Associate Professor at the Department of International and Strategic Studies, Universiti Malaya. The cluster also hosted Visiting Scholar Choon Hwee Koh who is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at UCLA, specialising in the history of Ottoman infrastructure. Moreover, we were fortunate to be able to host as a Virtual Academic Visitor, Prof Sujit Sivasundaram who is Professor of World History at the University of Cambridge.
SUSTAINABLE GOVERNANCE OF TRANSBOUNDARY ENVIRONMENTAL COMMONS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA (TECSEA) PROJECT MEMBERS Prof David Taylor Senior Research Fellow
Dr Michelle Miller NUS Collaborators
Ms Sumiya Bilegsaikhan Assoc Prof Roman Carrasco Assoc Prof Daniel Friess Dr Miles Kenney-Lazar Assoc Prof Alberto Salvo Assoc Prof Soo Yeon Kim Prof Alan Tan Ms Zu Dienle Tan International Collaborators
Dr Rini Astuti Australian National University
Dr Louis Lebel Chiang Mai University, Thailand
Assoc Prof Melissa Marschke University of Ottawa, Canada
Dr Carl Middleton Chulalongkorn University, Thailand
Prof Jonathan Rigg Bristol University, UK
Dr Diana Suhardiman International Water Management Institute, Lao PDR
NYU-Abu Dhabi
Dr Anh Thong Tran
Prof James D. Sidaway
Australian National University
Department of Geography, NUS
Dr Helena Muhamad Varkkey
Prof David Taylor
University of Malaya, Malaysia
Department of Geography, NUS
Dr Anh Thong Tran Australian National University FROM 1 JUN 2021
Dr Helena Muhamad Varkkey Universiti Malaya FROM 22 OCT 2021
Launched in 2017, the five-year Sustainable Governance of Transboundary Environmental Commons in Southeast Asia (TECSEA) programme of research entered its final year in 2021 (MOE2016-SSRTG-068). With findings published in over 30 journal articles, the research generated by this project has improved understanding of the challenges and opportunities for transboundary environmental governance within and beyond the Southeast Asian region. TECSEA’s research team comprises human and physical geographers, economists, biologists and political ecologists based in Singapore, Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, Indonesia, the UK and Canada. Two PhD students attached to the programme, Zu Dienle Tan and Sumiya Bilegsaikhan, have been trained in these interdisciplinary environmental research methods and are on track to graduate in 2022. A major finding of the TECSEA programme is that the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered cross-border environmental governance at different organisational scales in Southeast Asia. The prevailing focus on economic recovery from the pandemic recession jeopardises key transboundary arrangements aimed at safeguarding environmental arrangements, sustainability standards and activist arrangements. This has important implications for Singapore’s dependencies on common pool resources in Southeast Asia and for the region’s future capacity to adapt and build resilience to emerging climate change threats and impacts. In 2021, TECSEA researchers had a productive year, despite delays and disruptions caused by COVID-19. Since the onset of the pandemic, TECSEA researchers have made full use of online opportunities and regional research networks to generate new primary data. Results of this research were published in 2021 in high-impact journals such as Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Ecology and Society, Geoforum, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Science of the Total Environment, and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Several other journal articles and a special issue in Environmental Policy and Governance are forthcoming or in various stages of production. TECSEA researchers continued to showcase their findings in international fora throughout 2021. On 15 September 2021, TECSEA convened the Special Session of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) Virtual Land Commons Conference. On 10 December 2021, at ARI, TECSEA organised an online Stakeholder Workshop on Transboundary Environmental Commons of Southeast Asia: A Collaborative Approach to Policy Brief Development. Involving key stakeholders from various government agencies, international and local NGOs, and the agribusiness sector, this integrative workshop resulted in the co-production of two policy briefs that identify pathways for pursuing more effective, fair and inclusive forms of transboundary governance for common pool resources found in Southeast Asia.
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PROJECT
SUSTAINABLE GOVERNANCE OF TRANSBOUNDARY ENVIRONMENTAL COMMONS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA (TECSEA)
Due to be launched in February 2022, these policy briefs focus on recommendations for: (a) sustainable peatland governance to mitigate transboundary haze pollution; and (b) more inclusive ways of governing water resources in the Mekong, a region undergoing tremendous social-ecological transformations linked to large hydropower dam developments. To engage with transboundary environmental publics, TECSEA members also contributed opinion pieces in 2021 to The Business Times, the Bangkok Tribune, and ARIscope. These articles and TECSEA updates are available on the regularly updated programme website: https://www.tecsea.info/.
PUBLICATIONS, 2021 Astuti, R. (2021). Governing the ungovernable: The politics of disciplining pulpwood and palm oil plantations in Indonesia’s tropical peatland. Geoforum 124, 381-391. Astuti, R., Miller, M.A., McGregor, A., Sukmara, D.P., Saputra, W., Sulistiyanto, & Taylor, D. (2021). Making illegality visible: The governance dilemmas created by visualising illegal palm oil plantations in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. Land Use Policy. DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2021.105942 Marks, D. & Miller, M.A. (2021). A transboundary political ecology of air pollution: Slow violence on Thailand’s margins. Environmental Policy and Governance. DOI: 10.1002/eet.1976 Miller, M.A. (2021). A transboundary political ecology of volcanic sand mining. Annals of the American Association of Geographers. DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2021.1914539 Miller, M.A. (2021). Market-based commons: Social agroforestry, fire mitigation strategies and green supply chains in Indonesia’s peatlands. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. DOI: 10.1111/tran.12472 Miller, M.A., Tonoto, P., & Taylor, D. (2021). Sustainable development of carbon sinks? Lessons from three types of peatland partnerships in Indonesia. Sustainable Development. DOI: 10.1002/sd.2241 Miller, M.A., Alfajri, Astuti, R., Grundy-Warr, C., Middleton, C., Tan, Z.D., & Taylor, D. (2021). Hydrosocial rupture: Causes and consequences for transboundary governance. Ecology and Society 26(3), 21. DOI: 10.5751/ES-12545-260321
Rigg, J. (2021). Rural Development in Southeast Asia: Disposession, Accumulation and Persistence. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Suhardiman, D. & Geheb, K. (2021). Participation and politics in transboundary hydropower development: The case of the Pak Beng dam in Laos. Environmental Policy and Governance. DOI: 10.1002/eet.1974 Suhardiman, D., Rigg, J., Bandur, M., Marschke, M., Miller, M.A., Pheuangsavanh, N., Sayatham, M., & Taylor, D. (2021). On the coattails of globalization: Migration, migrants and COVID-19 in Asia. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47 (1), 88-109. Tan, Z.D., Lupascy, S., & Wijedasa, L. (2021). Paludiculture as a sustainable land use alternative for tropical peatlands: A review. Science of the Total Environment 753, 142111.
RELIGION AND GLOBALISATION
CLUSTER LEADER Prof Kenneth Dean
CLUSTER MEMBERS Assoc Prof Maitrii Aung-Thwin Dr Michel Chambon Ms Alicia Min Chan Dr Ningning Chen Dr Fabian Graham Dr Emily Hertzman Dr Guan Thye Hue Dr Natalie Lang Dr Erica Larson Dr Hongxuan Lin Dr Carola Lorea Dr Ying Ruo Show Dr Qi Wu Ms Yiran Xue
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In 2021 several religious communities with deep transnational linkages have faced new forms of immobility and disconnection due to the COVID pandemic. Rituals and congregations rapidly shifted online or to newly reconfigured sacred spaces: homes, Zoom meetings, and even balconies. During yet another year marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Religion and Globalisation Cluster has been actively engaged in documenting changes and responses at the intersections of religion and society within Asia and on a global scale. The cluster aimed to develop international academic conversations on the meaning of the COVID pandemic for Asian religious communities through virtual workshops, as well as through the continuation of the research blog CoronAsur: Religion and COVID-19. The blog CoronAsur, which was launched in May 2020, currently hosts more than 100 articles and has been visited by over fifty thousand readers. Supported by ARI and by externally funded research grants, the cluster members have engaged in the collection of new data on the impact of COVID on Asian communities and places of worship, its systematic documentation and analysis. Members have also continued to sustain the cluster’s expertise in the study of transnational religious networks, both empirically and methodologically. With Michel Chambon joining the cluster, ARI became a key hosting institute for the relevant and fast-growing project ISAC: Initiative for the Study of Asian Catholics. The project was launched on 1 October by Michel Chambon, in collaboration with former cluster member Assoc Prof Bernardo E. Brown. With new research methodologies to face the disruptions and the limitations induced by the COVID pandemic, in 2021 the cluster continued its work on mapping transnational Chinese religious networks and sharing new resources with the tools of Digital Humanities for the study of vernacular Tantric traditions. With the completion of a project of digitisation and preservation of Bengali esoteric literature and Baul performers’ manuscripts (EAP1247 Songs of the Old Madmen), in 2021 Carola Lorea and her team have created a new open access archive funded by the Endangered Archives Programme of the British Library. Cluster members combine their expertise in Asian languages, philology and history of religions, with the tools of digital archiving. Kenneth Dean, Guan Thye Hue, and Yiran Xue are systematically documenting the ‘Qing Dynasty Tombs of Singapore’ located in Bukit Brown, Lau Sua Cemetery, and adjoining cemeteries, with a digital humanities project supported by NHB and HDB grants. Funded by the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre, Chinese Epigraphy in Singapore is a cluster project led by Kenneth Dean aimed to gather and translate over 2000 inscriptions dating from 1911 to 2019 found in over 250 Chinese temples and associations in Singapore, as well as in 68 united or joint temples with over 350 temple units. Many of these temples are also being studied in terms of their responses to the COVID pandemic in a new project funded by the Ministry for Culture, Communication and Youth (MCCY).
Ningning Chen and Kenneth Dean have also conducted new research on Chinese huiguan, supported by an MOE Tier 1 grant. Chinese huiguan emerged as ancestral communities characterised by complex socio-cultural and economic relationships based on common ancestral ties of same lineage, surname, locality or dialect. Supported by the National Heritage Board, Show Ying Ruo’s Mapping Women’s Religious Heritage in Singapore aims to locate and document Chinese temples in Singapore that have been established and maintained by women since the late 19th century until today. Emily Hertzman and her team of collaborators in Indonesia are creating a digital database with the aim of mapping Chinese Religious Places in Singkawang, West Kalimantan. The project maps Chinese temples and spirit-medium altars in Singkawang and investigates the simultaneous re-emergence of transnational temple networks, and the proliferation of hybrid inter-ethnic spirit possession practices. As the home affiliation of ISAC: Initiative for the Study of Asian Catholics, the cluster is promoting research on understudied aspects of lived Catholicism, through a collaborative project focused on multidisciplinary and inter-Asian understandings of contemporary Catholic communities. Innovative research from the cluster included topics such as the intersections of Marxism and Islam in Indonesia, Hindu rituals in the Tamil diaspora, and the soundscapes of caste, religion and displacement across the Bay of Bengal. These topics are used as empirical springboards grounded in Asian contexts to theorise on broader issues and interrogate the multifaceted interplay of religious, secular and political spheres. Of the six conferences convened by cluster members in 2021, the main cluster workshop was Religion and COVID-19: Mediating Presence and Distance, 29-30 April, organised by Carola Lorea, Neena Mahadev, Natalie Lang and Ningning Chen and co-funded by Yap Kim Hao Memorial Fund for Comparative Religious Studies at Yale-NUS College. The papers focused on questions about ritual innovations in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, negotiating a tension between a desire to achieve a sense of togetherness and to carry out rituals while needing to maintain physical distance to curb viral spread. A special issue emerging from the workshop is forthcoming in the journal Religion (Spring 2022). The cluster held ten seminars in 2021, including public lectures by five virtual academic visitors. It also held two book launch events including one by cluster member Natalie Lang. Her first book, Religion and Pride: Hindus in Search of Recognition in La Réunion was discussed by Professors Christian Ghasarian, Patrick Eisenlohr, Knut Jabobsen, and Kenneth Dean. The cluster also hosted a book discussion of Singapore, Spirituality, and the Space of the State: Soul of the Little Red Dot by Prof Joanne Punzo Waghorne, with commentaries from Professors C.J.W.-L Wee and Beng Huat Chua.
CLUSTER ASSOCIATES Asst Prof Indira Arumugam Department of Sociology, NUS
Asst Prof Giuseppe Bolotta University of Venice Ca’ Foscari
Dr Gustav Brown Independent Researcher
Asst Prof Meng-Tat Jack Chia Department of History, NUS
Prof Gavin Flood University of Oxford
Assoc Prof Daniel Goh Department of Sociology, NUS
Asst Prof Annu Jalais South Asian Studies Programme, NUS
Asst Prof Neena Mahadev Yale-NUS College
Assoc Prof Oona Paredes Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA
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5.0 RESEARCH PROGRAMMES AND ACTIVITIES
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 46
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 47
As a contribution to the ARI20 Anniversary Roundtable Series, the cluster held an event titled Mapping Changes in Religion and Globalisation across Asia, featuring presentations by both current and former leaders and members of the cluster, including Carola Lorea, Kenneth Dean, Michael Feener and Peter van der Veer. In collaboration with the Department of Chinese Studies, the cluster invited Caroline Chia who presented her socio-cultural study, Hokkien Theatre across the Seas. Finally, at the end of the year Prof Vincent Goossaert gave a lecture about his most recent investigation into Spirit-Writing and Spiritual Exercises in the Lives of Late Imperial Chinese Literati.
CLUSTER ASSOCIATES Asst Prof Elliott Prasse-Freeman Department of Sociology, NUS
Assoc Prof Rajesh Rai South Asian Studies Programme, NUS
Prof Vineeta Sinha Department of Sociology, NUS
Asst Prof Stuart Strange Yale-NUS College
Assoc Prof John Whalen-Bridge Department of English Language and Literature, NUS
Asst Prof Nurfadzilah Yahaya Department of History, NUS
Dr Aga Zuoshi Independent Researcher
In 2021, cluster members were active in publishing their research monographs and articles, while also disseminating their insights within the international academic community through lectures, talks and online media. Ningning Chen published two co-authored journal articles: ‘Religion in times of crisis: Innovative lay responses and temporal-spatial reconfigurations of temple rituals in COVID-19 China’, with Kenneth Dean and Jinwen Chen, in Cultural Geographies; and with P. C. Ko and Jingfu Chen, ‘Active ageing in the countryside: Space, place and the performance of workleisure lifestyles in rural China’, in Population, Space and Place, vol. 27, issue 6. Carola Lorea worked with a team of six research assistants that she trained in remote and digital ethnography, to publish ‘Remote or unreachable? The gender of connectivity and the challenges of pandemic fieldwork across the Bay of Bengal’ in The Society of Cultural Anthropology, and a Bengali article in Bhabanagara: International Peer-reviewed Journal of Bengal Studies (Dhaka Vol. 13, no. 15: 1623-1647). Erica Larson’s ‘Scaling plural coexistence in Manado: What does it take to remain brothers?’ appeared in Indonesian Pluralities: Islam, Citizenship, and Democracy, edited by Robert W. Hefner and Zainal Abidin Bagir (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 37-74). Ying Ruo Show’s ‘Virtuous women on the move: Minnan vegetarian women (caigu) and Chinese Buddhism in twentieth-century Singapore’ was published in Huaren zongjiao yanjiu 華人宗教研究 [Studies in Chinese Religions], 17, 125-182 (Special Issue: Goddesses and Women in Chinese Religions). Kenneth Dean and Zheng Zhenman’s four-volume Epigraphical Materials on the History of Religion in Fujian: Zhangzhou Region (Fuzhou; Fujian Peoples Publishing House, 2020) received First Prize for a Social Scientific Contribution from the Fuijan Academy of Social Sciences in 2021.
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY
CLUSTER LEADER Assoc Prof Gregory Clancey
CLUSTER MEMBERS Dr Pui Yee Liz Chee Ms Grace En Ting Chong Dr Céline Coderey Dr Ashawari Chaudhuri Dr Connor Graham Dr Yoonhee Jung Dr Eric Kerr Dr Dongxin Zou
The STS Cluster had a busy year in 2021 despite the pandemic and the virtual halt to research travel. We continued to advance our flagship project, Heat in Urban Asia: Past, Present, and Future, which is funded by a Tier 2 Academic Research Fund grant from the Ministry of Education. Our core research team held weekly zoom meetings, built our databases, crafted a website, and hosted an international conference (via the internet) with more than 20 delegates. A selection of conference papers was crafted into a proposed special issue of a leading urban studies journal under our editorship, which has been provisionally accepted with all papers in the process of peer review. One of the journal’s editors wrote: ‘To my knowledge, [this] is the first special issue that takes a social science and humanities approach to examining the impacts of urban heat on the configuration of the urban landscape, urban life, urban governance, and urban infrastructure development strategies . . . This proposal is overdue given the dominance of the technical and quantitative studies on the issue of urban heat.’ Alongside our publication schedule, we have been working on a public-facing website, also titled Heat in Urban Asia, which translates some of our findings into layman’s language, and provides a more graphical interface than is possible with academic papers. This project is being done in collaboration with the NUS Libraries Digital Scholarship team, and represents ARI’s commitment to extending its research findings beyond the academy. Launched in December, the site includes short articles on a variety of topics relating to heat, as well as interactive maps of Singapore extending as far back as the early 1800s. Yoonhee Jung and Ms Grace Chong (project RA) led this initiative, with significant contributions from Ashawari Chaudhuri, and former ARI Postdoctoral Fellows Fiona Williamson and Christopher Courtney, among others. Our long-standing research interest in Asian medicines scored a major success this year with the publication of Liz P.Y. Chee’s Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China by Duke University Press. This is the first scholarly history and analysis of the use of animals in Chinese medicine, and the first to bridge the gap between the growing research on Asian medicines and the fields of animal/wildlife studies and environmental studies. The topic is particularly timely given the new attention being given to zoonotic diseases in the face of the pandemic. Liz Chee has followed this up by co-authoring a major (Tier 2) grant proposal to create a database of the use of animal parts and tissues across a range of Asian medicines, which will allow us to make comparisons and trace changes in historical usage and interpretation.
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5.0 RESEARCH PROGRAMMES AND ACTIVITIES
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 48
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 49
Also on the topic of health and medicine, Dongxin Zou will organise an international conference in 2022 on the theme of Health Infrastructure and Asia’s Epidemiological Transitions: Historical Perspectives. Our partners in this venture are the German Institute of Japanese Studies in Tokyo. This will continue and further broaden the health science thematic strand of the cluster, which we have pioneered since our founding in 2009. The cluster also entered collaboration this year with a team from NTU’s Earth Observatory to craft a major (Tier 3) grant project which will uniquely combine elements of the physical and social sciences. Titled Integrating Volcano and Earthquake Science Technology (INVEST) in Southeast Asia, the cluster will be responsible for mapping and analysing the human and historical geography of volcanism and seismicity in the region, as manifest in architecture, settlement patterns, and other identifiable social and cultural markers. The cluster has a long history of working with scientists, but this five-year project (to begin in 2022) will be unprecedented for its scale, and demonstrates the value that social science and humanities approaches can contribute to science-based projects. Cluster leader and Assoc Prof Gregory Clancey also co-edited a special issue of the Journal of the History of Science and Technology (HoST) on ‘Building Sites, Crafting Knowledge’, based on an earlier conference in Hangzhou, China on the concept of craft in historical and modern technology. He also contributed a paper on seismicity to the University of Athens conference The Perils of Prediction in the Physical Sciences: Historical and Epistemological Perspectives, and continued his long-standing consultantship with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) through authoring expert papers and serving as the US delegate to meetings on the Fukushima nuclear accident.
The cluster continued its long-standing links to the university-level Tembusu College, where a number of its research fellows teach and have joint appointments. Céline Coderey has recently published articles on medicine in Myanmar in such journals as Modern Asian Studies and the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. Eric Kerr continues his service as associate editor of the journal Social Epistemology, while Connor Graham continues his membership on the advisory board of East Asian Science, Technology, and Society. The arrival of new cluster postdoctoral fellows, research fellows, and visiting senior research fellows was naturally postponed this year due to pandemic-related travel restrictions, but we plan to welcome six new members across these categories in 2022 as and when the situation improves. These include researchers working on such topics as traditional medicines in Laos, and settlement around volcanoes in the Philippines, among others. The cluster also inaugurated a change in leadership this year, as Gregory Clancey’s term is set to expire in 2022 after a 13-year tenure. The new cluster leader designate, Jiat-Hwee Chang is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the NUS Department of Architecture, and an existing cluster associate with long-standing links to ARI. Both have been working closely since 2018 as Principal Investigator and Co-Principal Investigator of the Heat in Urban Asia grant-funded project, and will continue in the same roles in the upcoming INVEST project, ensuring a smooth transition. Jiat-Hwee Chang and Liz Chee, promoted this year as the cluster’s first senior research fellow, are both native-born Singaporeans, marking another important transition for this interdisciplinary field. Assoc Prof Chang has significant interests and experience in environmental studies, and is sure to further build and strengthen that important thematic strand.
CLUSTER ASSOCIATES Prof Itty Abraham Department of Southeast Asian Studies, NUS
Assoc Prof Timothy P. Barnard Department of History, NUS FROM 1 AUG 2021
Assoc Prof Jiat-Hwee Chang Department of Architecture, NUS
Dr Yee Han Kuan Tembusu College, NUS
Asst Prof Shi Lin Loh Department of History, NUS
Asst Prof Canay Ozden-Schilling Department of Sociology, NUS FROM 1 AUG 2021
Asst Prof Tom Ozden-Schilling Department of Sociology, NUS FROM 1 APR TO 30 SEP 2021
Assoc Prof John W.P. Phillips Department of English Language and Literature, NUS
Assoc Prof Hallam Stevens Nanyang Technological University
Dr John van Whye Department of Biological Sciences, and Tembusu College, NUS
Asst Prof Fiona Williamson Singapore Management University
Assoc Prof Lonce Wyse Department of Communications and New Media, and Tembusu College, NUS
THE ASIAN PEACE PROGRAMME
PROGRAMME MEMBERS Programme Coordinator
Prof Kishore Mahbubani Administrative Director
Dr Kesava Chandra Varigonda UWCSEA-APP Peace Fellow
Mr Bertrand Ming Yan Seah
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5.0 RESEARCH PROGRAMMES AND ACTIVITIES
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 50
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 51
The Asian Peace Programme (APP) was launched on 1 July 2020, as a programme housed within the Asia Research Institute (ARI). The APP aims to be Asia’s pre-eminent peace research programme. It hopes to produce policy-relevant research, by putting forth pragmatic and implementable ideas that can help ameliorate conflicts in various parts of Asia. In 2021, APP has produced two products. The first product, and APP’s flagship, is the APP Policy Essay series. The stated impact of these essays may be compared to that of a small acupuncture needle which, when inserted in the right spot, can produce a lot of healing. In 2021, the APP published 15 Policy Essays, written by prominent scholars and policy practitioners, from Singapore and the rest of the world. All policy essays have also been re-published in prominent newspapers in Asia, including the South China Morning Post (SCMP) and The Straits Times, as well as the prominent international magazine, Foreign Policy. The second product is the APP podcast series, the Asian Peace Talks. The goal of the podcast series is to steer conversation towards conflict resolution and peace in Asia, keeping both the scholarly audience and general public in mind. Launched in March 2021, the APP has published six podcast episodes, featuring prominent policymakers in Singapore and academics. The podcast series have, until date, a combined listenership of nearly 100,000.
Support
Ms Carol Chan Asst Senior Manager and Personal Assistant to Programme Coordinator
In late 2021, the APP also began a partnership with the United World College of Southeast Asia (UWCSEA), Singapore. As part of this partnership, the first UWCSEA-APP Peace Fellow has been appointed by UWCSEA and APP. In addition, the APP is also jointly organising the 1st APP-UWCSEA Peacebuilding Policy Essay competition, aimed at higher secondary students in UWCSEA. The competition is running from January to March 2022, and the winners will be announced in May 2022. The APP is founded and helmed by Prof Kishore Mahbubani, a Distinguished Fellow at ARI. Prof Mahbubani was also Founding Dean of LKYSPP from 2004 to 2017. Before that, he was with the Singapore Foreign Service for 33 years, from 1971 to 2004, where he served twice as Singapore’s Ambassador to the United Nations and as Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Ministry from 1993-1998. Prof Mahbubani is the author of nine books, including the latest, The Asian 21st Century (2022), which is an open access book. The APP team also includes two researchers, Kesava Chandra Varigonda (who is also administrative director) and Bertrand Ming Yan Seah, who has been appointed as UWCSEA-APP Peace Fellow.
In addition, APP is strongly supported by Carol Chan, manager and personal assistant to Prof Mahbubani. In early 2022, APP is set to launch a new product to its repertoire: the APP Policy Brief series. The policy briefs, of around 3,000-4,000 words each, are academic papers that take a deep dive into various aspects of conflict and peace in Asia. These will be written by scholars and policymakers working on various aspects of conflict resolution in Asia. Each policy brief will be peer reviewed by two external reviewers engaged by APP, prior to being published. The APP will aim to re-publish the policy briefs in prominent academic journals.
6.0 EVENTS ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 52
6.0 EVENTS
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 53
CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS
ARI continues working on its objective ‘to be a place of encounters between the region and the world’ by hosting seminars, workshops and conferences aimed at generation and exchange of ideas. During the year 2021, the Institute organised 16 conferences and workshops, convened by its research fellows and postdoctoral scholars. Speakers and attendees from diverse academic communities in Singapore and from throughout the world converged on Zoom to participate in these events.
MANAGING THE COSMOPOLITAN CITY: INTER-ASIAN STRATEGIES OF ETHNIC ADMINISTRATION, PAST AND PRESENT 14 -15 Jan 2021, ARI, NUS (online via Zoom) Convenors: Dr Matthew Reeder, Dr Yang Yang and Dr Clay K. Eaton
LEISURE FOR OLDER ADULTS IN ASIA 19-20 Jan 2021, ARI, NUS (online via Zoom) Convenors: Dr Benny Tong, Prof Wei-Jun Jean Yeung and Assoc Prof Leng Leng Thang
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ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 55
This conference invited scholars to push beyond the formal boundaries of individual cities, empires, and nations by interrogating this dispersal of people and ideas across urban Asia. Some questions explored included: How is knowledge related to the administration of ethnic communities transmitted from place to place within or beyond Asia? How have diasporic communities contributed to the dispersal of different strategies of ethnic administration? The conference started with a roundtable discussion featuring three leading scholars of the field. They discussed how interdisciplinary methods can help us investigate shifting modes of governance, how we can compare cities and trace the links between them, and how we can study social concepts that are understood in different ways depending on the place, the time, and the actors involved. Six panels followed, each considering a different aspect of the conference theme: (1) Contestation and Collaboration in Colonial Cities; (2) Claiming Space in Local Politics; (3) Making and Mixing Categories; (4) Negotiating Minority Identities; (5) Camp Town/Company Town; and (6) Constituting Urban Asia between Cities. Eight papers from the conference have been selected for publication in Asian Ethnicity.
The conference combined the research interests of the Religion and Globalisation, and Asian Urbanisms clusters. While religious and urban studies reveal the importance of worlding practices and the sensory dimensions of religious and urban experiences, the conference shifted debates on religion and the city to the body as the very site of sensory religious and urban experience, and as site of negotiation and regulation. The papers included a variety of religious traditions (Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Zoroastrian, Daoist) in different urban contexts (Singapore, Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City, Kuwait, London, urban China, urban Malaysia). Gender and body as lenses of analysis provided rich insights into the relation between religious conceptualisations of gendered bodies and bodily spatial practices. Examples ranged from manners of walking, being, and clothing as performance of masculinities or moral female bodies, over cross-dressing in gender-shifting rituals, to reproduction politics. The collection of papers demonstrates how religious rituals can create and transform gender identities, and how religious rituals can co-construct the city through their spatial claims and through the sensory and bodily experiences and urban memories they provide.
In contributing to the nascent literature on the intersection between leisure and ageing, this conference brought together young scholars and leading experts from various disciplinary backgrounds to build a comparative and integrated view of leisure participation among seniors. The empirical case studies were wide-ranging in geographical scope, including Singapore, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, India, Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Through these studies, we also came together to re-conceptualise the relationship between leisure participation and ageing, particularly from perspectives that better account for the socio-economic contexts and individual biographies of seniors in Asia. The first four panels discussed social class issues, gender issues, the relationship between leisure and senior health, and digital leisure practices. The second discussed conceptualisations of well-being, community building, and images, identities and subjectivities. The discussions were invigorating and critical, and highlighted the potential for future studies on leisure participation of seniors, as Asian societies increasingly age. We also built up a common understanding of the need for more academic research that can better explain the processes through which leisure activities are experienced by seniors, in addition to analysing the determinants or effects of participation.
URBAN RELIGION, GENDER, AND THE BODY 25-27 Jan 2021, ARI, NUS (online via Zoom) Convenor: Dr Natalie Lang
TRANSNATIONAL RELIGIOUS NETWORKS: ALTERNATIVE ARTICULATIONS AND NEW ETHNOGRAPHIC METHODOLOGIES 3-5 Mar 2021, ARI, NUS (online via Zoom) Convenors: Dr Ningning Chen, Dr Fabian Graham and Prof Kenneth Dean
This workshop built on a growing body of literature that moves beyond the dominant focus on migrants and migration towards alternative articulations of transnational religious networks. Of the 23 papers presented, some explored the role of non-migrants such as state and higher education institutions in the generation of religious networks. Others highlighted alternative ways of religious networking through temple alliances, missionary movement, and summer camps. Some also attended to alternative channels of digital medias, cosmopolitan discourses, and place stories embedded in the production of religious networks across borders. Trendy topics in relation to Belt Road Initiatives and new methodologies were also discussed. Collectively, the workshop articulated alternative transnational religious networks through engaging in different kinds of religions, ranging from formal, institutional forms (e.g., Christianity and Islam) to popular, non-institutionalised beliefs and practices (e.g., the cult of local deities). It argued that transnational religion or religious transnationalism can be (re)produced independently from migration networks. Yet at the same time, it also drew attention to alternative networks which are intersected with, mediated by and shape migrants’ practices, experiences, and networks in transnational spheres.
BUILDING CITY KNOWLEDGE FROM NEIGHBOURHOODS 11-12 Mar 2021, ARI, NUS (online via Zoom) Convenors: Dr Hae Young Yun, Assoc Prof Kong Chong Ho, Dr Rita Padawangi and Dr Paul Rabé Jointly organised with the Southeast Asia Neighbourhoods Network (SEANNET) of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)
HEAT IN URBAN ASIA: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE 22-23 Apr 2021, ARI, NUS (online via Zoom) Convenors: Dr Yoonhee Jung, Assoc Prof Gregory Clancey, Dr Fiona Williamson, Assoc Prof Jiat-Hwee Chang, Asst Prof Christopher Courtney and Prof Amita Baviskar With support from MOE Tier 2 Grant – Heat in Urban Asia: Past, Present, and Future
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6.0 EVENTS
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ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 57
This conference explored the relationship between the city and its neighbourhoods. The story of Asian cities remains largely recounted by dominant actors in urban redevelopment (i.e., government agencies and real estate developers) or by ‘scientific’ knowledge developed in state-sanctioned professional education institutions like architecture or city planning programmes. The papers presented addressed the role of neighbourhoods from many parts of Asia, with contributions from India (Delhi), Indonesia (Jakarta), Japan (Tokyo), Hong Kong, Myanmar (Yangon and Mandalay), Thailand (Bangkok and Chiang Mai), Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City), and so on. The papers focused on neighbourhood capacities to share ideas and practices with other neighbourhoods and for the city. In particular, we responded to Goh and Bunnell’s (2016: 829) call to reconsider the agency of cities, by taking the neighbourhood seriously as the spatial scale of that agency. The papers presented findings and processes of research that engage with civic partners in city neighbourhoods. Beyond the question of morphological urban scale, it is important to address ‘what goes on’ within these communities, and how these neighbourhoods have crystallised into original forms of urban citizens’ movements.
With the onset of the pandemic, various wide-reaching regulations were implemented to mitigate the virality of disaster throughout the world. The papers in the collection examined how these regulations, and anxieties of infection, intervened in religious lives, practices, and theologies. How have ritual actions, events and performances been (re)mediated, requiring ritual practitioners to navigate the complex balance between ‘presence’ (Engelke 2007) and cautious ‘distance’? How did established patterns of religious participation and practice, including ‘sensational forms’ (Meyer 2011), emerge as reproduced, (dis)embodied or re-invented? In what ways did the channelling of devotees out of shared space onto remote media platforms generate disembodied religious experience, or ever new forms of embodiment? This publication-oriented workshop, aimed towards the preparation of a Special Issue, was successfully conducted online through an innovative format, using synchronous as well as asynchronous platforms for interactions among the participants. Seven of the 16 papers are currently under preparation for a special collection in the journal Religion.
The theme could not be more timely, given global warming and the corresponding increase in urban heat waves and recognition of the urban heat island effect. We posit that heat- may be the next great urban public health crisis in Asia following the current pandemic, but one that most of the cities in our region are ill-prepared for. Coping with heat in Asia also has an unexcavated history which we intend to document. The potential benefits of our conference on Heat in Urban Asia, beyond academic publications, include possible policy recommendations and new ways of illustrating the urban relationship to heat, using Singapore and selected other Asian cities (Hong Kong, Wuhan, Delhi, etc.) as our models. This conference brought together young scholars and leading experts from interand multidisciplinary backgrounds to better understand and discuss heat in urban Asia. Invited scholars provided theoretical, empirical, historical, or geographical studies, addressing one or more of our three themes including: 1) taking the city’s temperature, 2) living with heat, and 3) disastrous heat. Vibrant discussions on heat have yield many insights, on how heat has been conceptualised, recorded, governed, and dealt with in daily life, historically and contemporarily, and how to better prepare for the future with increasing heat.
RELIGION AND THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: MEDIATING PRESENCE AND DISTANCE 29-30 Apr 2021, ARI, NUS (online via Zoom) Convenors: Dr Carola Lorea, Dr Neena Mahadev, Dr Natalie Lang and Dr Ningning Chen Jointly sponsored with a grant from Yap Kim Hao Memorial Fund for Comparative Religious Studies at Yale-NUS College, Singapore
THIRD CHINA MADE WORKSHOP: THE SOCIAL LIFE OF CHINESE INFRASTRUCTURES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA 19-21 May 2021, ARI, NUS (online via Zoom) Convenors: Dr Darren Byler, Prof Tim Oakes, Dr Yang Yang, Prof Tim Bunnell and Prof Rachel Silvey With funding from The Henry Luce Foundation and co-hosted by The Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto
This workshop engaged in the growing interest in contemporary Chinese infrastructure development across social sciences and humanities, particularly in the Southeast Asian context. It focused on fine-grained investigations of Chinese infrastructures in Southeast Asia, including the political, social, cultural, spatial, and environmental dimensions of infrastructure planning, construction, and use. It accommodated a total of 17 papers on various case studies of Chinese infrastructure development in the region (Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam), presented by scholars from multiple disciplines (geography, history, sociology, anthropology, and ethnic studies) based in various institutions in Singapore and abroad (Yale-NUS, NUS, University of Toronto, McGill University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Murdoch University, the Australian National University, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Tallinn University). A pre-workshop panel discussion, ‘Roundtable Discussion on BRI as Method: Forging Theoretical Agendas’, was held by Prof James Sidaway, Prof Naoko Shimazu, and Dr Shaun Lin the week before the workshop. The panel featured scholars from various disciplines including anthropology, geography, and political science to allow interdisciplinary conversations on theoretical implications of China’s recent Belt and Road Initiatives.
ISLAMIC THIRD WORLDISM 15-16 Jun 2021, ARI, NUS (online via Zoom) Convenors: Dr Hongxuan Lin and Dr Teren Sevea Jointly organised with the Harvard University Asia Center and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University
SENDING STATE REGIMES AND INTERNATIONAL SKILLED MIGRATION: ASIAN PERSPECTIVES IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL MIGRATION 23-24 Aug 2021, ARI, NUS (online via Zoom) Convenors: Prof Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Prof Margaret Walton-Roberts, Dr Yasmin Ortiga, Dr Exequiel Cabanda and Ms Kristel Acedera With funding support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Grant at Wilfrid Laurier University
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ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 59
This workshop focused on the content of multilingual publications (and self-avowed ‘progaganda organs’) that disseminated a corpus of ideas we might gloss as ‘Islamic Third Worldism’. Calling upon audiences to practise real Islam, Islamic Third Worldists condemned secular ideologies for constraining Islamic self-assertion and promoting capitalist exploitation, class warfare, dictatorship, fascism, despotism, imperialism, and nationalism. Southeast Asia’s Islamic Third Worldists also promoted what amounted to an ‘Islamic International’, going beyond a loose sense of co-membership in the ummah. They advocated for scholars, jurists, theologians, Sufis, Islamic modernists, Islamists, even across the Sunni and Shi’a confessional divide, to transcend their theological divisions and unite as a bloc. The purpose of this bloc was to propagate real Islam as the universal ideology for modernity, one that could rival the globe-straddling allure of Eurocentric ideologies like capitalism, parliamentary democracy, and communism. This workshop was the first to engage this subject of Islamic Third Worldism, with a focus on Southeast Asia. Experts from eight different universities across four continents participated, each contributing an early-stage research paper. A follow-up workshop has been scheduled for June 2022, hosted by Harvard University Asia Center.
In recent years, many Asian cities have invested in the digitalisation of cultural heritage, by developing virtual museum galleries, digitally enhanced experiences such as augmented reality or virtual reality, and participatory digital archiving platforms. These innovations are widely lauded for their potential to rejuvenate heritage, reach out to young publics, foster participation and interaction. But the implications of digitally enhanced heritage for urban diversity have been little explored. This workshop brought together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to advance the reflection on the opportunities and challenges that new technologies represent for heritage in diverse Asian cities. Through the analysis of case studies in India, China, and Southeast Asia, dealing with various heritage sectors such as museums, audio-visual or urban heritage, they raised a range of questions such as the role of digitalisation of heritage in expanding access to diverse urban populations and the respective role of public policies, private and civil society actors to foster digital heritage in highly diverse urban contexts. The panels discussed, among others, the digitalisation of intangible cultural heritage in Central Java and Qingdao; heritage planning in the digital age; the role of digital tools in the fabric of plural heritage narratives in redeveloped heritage districts in Doha and Singapore; and crowdsourcing urban heritage.
This workshop showcased 15 papers from scholars across disciplines on a variety of case studies reflecting on state policies, strategies, and structures that facilitate labour migration. The paper presentations were organised into five panels on expansive themes such as education, development and migration nexus, crisis, disruption, and return, skills formation, and regime, immobilities, and international cooperation and transnational actors. These papers offered new findings, conceptualisation and/or theorisation, and methodological insights on the role of sending states in managing, facilitating, or promoting labour migration. After engaging and rich discussions among the participants, the workshop had raised important and critical questions that could contribute to a more nuanced understanding of sending state regimes. These questions are: (1) How does an attention to sending state regimes help us develop more nuanced definitions of skill? (2) Who exactly is the ‘sending state’ and what is their role in global migration? (3) How does the sending state help us understand the understudied aspects of labour migration like return and repatriation? and (4) How to study sending states (regimes)?
CULTURAL HERITAGE, DIGITALISATION AND URBAN DIVERSITY IN ASIA 23-24 Sep 2021, ARI, NUS (online via Zoom) Convenors: Dr Jérémie Molho and Dr Dan Zhang
INTERROGATING THE NOTION OF ‘CULT’ AS A SOCIAL FORMATION IN ASIAN RELIGIONS 21-22 Oct 2021, ARI, NUS (online via Zoom) Convenors: Dr Emily Hertzman and Prof Kenneth Dean
In religious studies, the term ‘cult‘, ‘temple cult‘ and ‘deity cult‘ refer to popular followings of temples, deities, gurus, teachings or practices which are not cessarily secretive and often enter into mainstream religious practice. Studies of these types of cults range in historical period and geographic location and come from multiple disciplinary traditions. Whether referring to the 16th century development of Confucian cults (Murray 2009), the role of obscure Bengali cults in contributing to religious literature (Dasgupta 1946), arguing for the centrality of ancestral cults in Chinese society (Ahern 1973), describing the spread of the cult of Guangze Zunwang from China to Southeast Asia (Tat 2009), or the current rise in village guardian cults in Northern Vietnam (Hung 2016), these studies each identify one unit of analysis as the ‘cult‘. However, it is unclear whether these conceptualisations of ‘cult’ are referring to the same social-cultural configuration. What, in fact, is a temple/deity cult in the context of Asian religious traditions? How does membership in a temple/deity cult contribute to people’s sense of self and sense of belonging in the world? The 17 papers presented in this workshop provoked new insights and generated new conclusions about the notion of a cult in Asian religion traditions.
ASIA’S WET NATURES: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE 28-29 Oct 2021, ARI, NUS (online via Zoom) Convenors: Dr Anthony D. Medrano and Dr Chitra Venkataramani Organised by Yale-NUS College, with support from NUS Libraries and Asia Research Institute
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ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 61
This workshop sought to think with ‘water’—as method, source, and archive. In doing so, it explored the past, present, and future of Asia’s wet natures. We cultivated an interdisciplinary conversation about the lives and legacies of water through paper presentations and panel discussions. Broadly, the workshop engaged questions such as: How can ecological pasts and transboundary futures be rethought or reframed as water abandons or occupies new geographies and economic spaces? How can approaches to art, science, and conservation be used to restore critical understandings of intertidal habitats and how do these approaches rest against the rising tide of intensive infrastructural interventions? In what ways do aquatic biota—and their the more-than-human-worlds—weave into evolving urban landscapes and environmental imaginaries? In charting these watery questions to new and unexpected ends, we brought together a diversity of participants—undergraduates on panels with senior experts; artists on panels with historians; and, marine ecologists on panels with urban designers. Participants came from the UK, The Netherlands, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, the U.S., Germany, Canada, and Singapore. As intended, the diversity of participation reflected a diversity of method, perspective, training, geography, and inquiry.
This workshop brought together scholars of Asian migration to consider what migrant parenting in Asia means for parents, families, and communities across old, new and/or multiple homes. Aspects of migrant parenting considered included the different migration policies which hinder and/or facilitate migrant parenting to be accomplished in multidimensional, unexpected, and creative ways; and the kinds of migration (circular/circuit migration, stepwise migration) within Asia which engender variant forms of parental care enmeshed with ideological Asian values. Presenters brought together cutting edge works in progress that examine the emergence of mobile parenting cultures from the perspective of the scholarship on, from and around Asia. A total of 14 papers were presented on various reproductive mobility issues, child-raising dilemmas, and conflicting immigrant parenting identities and practices in the region (Singapore, the Philippines, China, Japan, Malaysia, India, Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand), presented by critical feminist, parenting, education, communication and social science scholars from multiple disciplines (geography, history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and communication and media studies based in various institutions in Singapore (NUS, SUTD) and abroad (University of the Philippines Diliman, University Airlangga, Edith Cowan University, City University of Hong Kong, SOAS University of London, University of Auckland, Yonsei University, University of Tokyo Institutes for Advanced Study, Lingnan University).
CONTESTED ASIAN PARENTING IN INTRA-ASIA MIGRATION 16-17 Nov 2021, ARI, NUS (online via Zoom) Convenors: Dr Chand Somaiah, Dr Exequiel Cabanda, Assoc Prof Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho and Prof Brenda S.A. Yeoh
The goal of the conference was to convene scholars from a variety of disciplines to consider the sites and processes of ethical learning in relation to religious traditions, as well as their consequences for subjectivity and personhood.
SITES AND PROCESSES OF ETHICAL LEARNING: RELIGION AND SELF-MAKING IN ASIA 1-3 Nov 2021, ARI, NUS (online via Zoom) Convenor: Dr Erica Larson
The four panels were grouped into themes dealing with rituals and authoritative knowledge, religious networks and pedagogies, gendered ethics, and religio-civic selfhood. Panels included four paper authors and two discussants (except for the first panel, which included two authors and two discussants). Through a discussion of sites and processes whereby ethical learning takes place, important insights and directions have emerged. First of all, across the papers and panels, a complex and multifaceted picture of subjectivity emerges, in which individuals are not one-dimensional or tied to solitary aspirations. In addition, the case studies explored have also demonstrated the importance of considering ethics not only in relation to personal or individualized transformation, but as a form and practice of relationality. Finally, a theme of crisis and suffering as important sites of ethical learning also emerged as an important direction to be further explored.
SEASONS OF REVOLUTIONS: TRANSNATIONAL LIVES OF NATIONALIST REVOLTS 2-3 Dec 2021, ARI, NUS (online via Zoom) Convenors: Dr Yang Yang, Dr Ameem Lutfi, Dr Nisha Mathew and Dr Serkan Yolacan
This workshop focused on three key instances of local rebellions cascading into serial revolutions in Asia: (1) constitutional revolutions from the early 20th century that led to the rise of republics in Russia, Turkey, and Iran; (2) mid-20th-century independence movements that ended centuries-long colonial rule and resulted in sovereign nation-states across the Indian Ocean; and (3) early 21st century Arab Spring protests that spilled across the Middle East toppling decades-old military dictatorships. It brought together cutting edge works in progress that reflect on how ideas and ideologies of revolutions travel and find force in unexpected places. Eight papers on various revolutionary moments in the 20th and 21st centuries examined transnational connections initiated by highly mobile actors between countries in Southeast, East, West Asia, and South America. They were presented by scholars from multiple disciplines (anthropology, Asian Studies, history, and political science) based in various institutions in Singapore and abroad (Duke University, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Sciences Po Paris, and Thammasat University). A panel discussion was scheduled on the last day of the workshop to facilitate conversations between panellists, presenters, organisers, and the audience on methodological approaches to study revolutionary movements from disciplines like anthropology, geography, history, and political science.
6.0 EVENTS
6.0 EVENTS
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ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 63
ARI SEMINAR SERIES The Asia Research Institute Seminar Series features seminars that vary in scope and are able to appeal across various academic disciplines. Seminars may also be on topics related to the different clusters’ work. They bring together NUS scholars—faculty members and ARI researchers—working on particular areas or themes. This is a listing of the seminars organised in 2021. 7 JAN 2021
25 FEB 2021
IR Theory for a World of Anxiety
Perfect Order: Recognising Complexity in Bali
Prof Bahar Rumelili Koç University, Istanbul
Prof J. Stephen Lansing University of Arizona, USA
8 APR 2021
14 MAY 2021
Organised with Department of Malay Studies, NUS
Roundtable Discussion on BRI as Method: Forging Theoretical Agendas
Sports Events, Nation-Building and City Politics in Indonesia Dr Friederike Trotier University of Passau, Germany 13 APR 2021 Transnational Social Protection: The Role of Religious Institutions and Networks
Dr Yang Yang Asia Research Institute, NUS
Making Chinese Biomedicine Global 1911-1970
Whose International Society? Anti-Colonial Movements against Nuclear Armageddon in Asia-Pacific
Dr Wayne Soon Vassar College, USA
Prof Robbie Shilliam Johns Hopkins University, USA
16 APR 2021
18 JAN 2021
24 MAR 2021
Hokkien Theatre across the Seas: A Socio-cultural Study
Identity Politics and Foreign Policy: Non-Western Perspectives
The Triumph of Chinese Statism in Family Policy-making: An Evolution from the May 4th Movement to the Present
Prof Rachel Harris University of London, UK
Dr Caroline Chia Department of Chinese Studies, NUS 27 APR 2021
25 MAR 2021
Assoc Prof Steve Ferzacca University of Lethbridge, Canada
28 JAN 2021 Spiritual Journeys: Global Occult and the Secret History of Modern Hinduism
Dr Victor Seow Harvard University, USA
Assoc Prof Varuni Bhatia Azim Premji University, India
1 APR 2021
Virtual Worlds in Pandemic Times: A Report on Research
Sing, Dance, and Clean with Us: A Legal Geography of Protest and Movement in Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong’s Subaltern Assemblage
Prof Tom Boellstorff University of California - Irvine, USA
Mr Dhiraj Nainani University of Hong Kong
2 FEB 2021
Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam
Prof Yunxiang Yan University of California, Los Angeles, USA, and Fudan University, China
‘Coal is the Grain of Industry’: Carbon Technocracy and Socialist Industrialisation in the Early People’s Republic
Prof Tim Oakes University of Colorado Boulder, USA
15 APR 2021
Organised with Department of Chinese Studies, NUS
Dr Thorsten Wojczewski King’s College London, UK
Assoc Prof Ja Ian Chong Department of Political Science, NUS
Assoc Prof Woon Chih Yuan Department of Geography, NUS
18 MAR 2021
Prof Bahar Rumelili Koç University, Turkey
Dr Darren Byler University of Colorado Boulder, USA
Prof Peggy Levitt Harvard University, USA
13 JAN 2021
Assoc Prof Yinan He Lehigh University, USA
Prof Tim Bunnell Asia Research Institute, NUS
Organised with Yale-NUS College, Singapore
Book Discussion on ‘Making Sonic City, Rock Music, and Urban Life in Singapore’
4 MAY 2021 Archiving Social Experiences of COVID-19: Diverse Stories, Memories & Methods from Southeast Asia and Beyond Three panels of 14 collaborators of the Living with COVID-19 in Southeast Asia project probed questions of memory, community and governance raised by personal and visual experiences of the pandemic in each ASEAN country recorded through the project. Convenors: Prof Naoko Shimazu, Dr Gerard McCarthy & Dr Yang Yang
25 MAY 2021 The Cosmopolitan Moment in Colonial Modernity: The Bahá’í Faith, Transnational Circulations, and Universalist Movements in Early Twentieth Century China Prof David A. Palmer The University of Hong Kong 1 JUN 2021 Book Discussion on ‘Sensible Politics: Visualising International Relations’ Prof William A. Callahan London School of Economics and Political Science, UK Assoc Prof Ja Ian Chong Department of Political Science, NUS Asst Prof Marina J. Kaneti Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS
6.0 EVENTS
6.0 EVENTS
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ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 65
3 JUN 2021
22 JUL 2021
25 NOV 2021
Book Discussion on ‘Religion and Pride: Hindus in Search of Recognition in La Réunion’
Book Discussion on ‘Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border’
Migrant Healthcare Workers and Infrastructures of Skill in Singapore
Dr Natalie Lang Asia Research Institute, NUS
Dr Malini Sur Western Sydney University, Australia
Prof Patrick Eisenlohr University of Göttingen, Germany
Prof Itty Abraham Department of Southeast Asian Studies, NUS
Prof Christian Ghasarian University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Assoc Prof Sidharthan Maunaguru Department of South Asian Studies, NUS
Prof Knut A. Jacobsen University of Bergen, Norway
Assoc Prof Jessica Hinchy Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Prof Kenneth Dean Asia Research Institute, NUS
12 AUG 2021
17 JUN 2021 Diversity in Neighbourhoods: Magnifying Glass or Cushion to Migration and Intercultural Contact Assoc Prof Chan-Hoong Leong Singapore University of Social Sciences 23 JUN 2021 Sacrifice and Indebtedness: The Intergenerational Contract in Chinese Rural Migrant Families
Book Discussion on Introducing ‘Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China’ Dr Liz P.Y. Chee Asia Research Institute, NUS 15 SEP 2021 Advancing Digital Humanities Research into Singapore’s Epidemic, Environmental, and Urban History Dr Fiona Williamson Singapore Management University
Dr Xiaorong Gu Asia Research Institute, NUS
Prof Kenneth Dean Asia Research Institute, NUS
24 JUN 2021
Ms Rachel Teng The HomeGround-Asia, Singapore
Brothers and Sisters from Afar: Understanding China’s Islamic Diplomacy and its Muslim Minorities in the Southeast Asian Context Dr Yang Yang Asia Research Institute, NUS
Asst Prof Yasmin Ortiga Singapore Management University 1 DEC 2021 Organised by Yale-NUS College, and supported by NUS Libraries
The Sociality of Birds: Reflections on Ontological Edge Effects Prof Anna Tsing University of California Santa Cruz, USA 1 DEC 2021 Book Discussion on ‘Singapore, Spirituality, and the Space of the State: Soul of the Little Red Dot’ Prof Joanne Punzo Waghorne Syracuse University, USA Prof C. J. W.-L. Wee Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Prof Beng Huat Chua Yale-NUS College, Singapore, and Department of Sociology, NUS 7 DEC 2021 Spirit-Writing and Spiritual Exercises in the Lives of Late Imperial Chinese Literati
Mr Reuben W. X. Wang University of Edinburgh, UK
Prof Vincent Goossaert École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) – PSL
Dr Stefan Huebner Asia Research Institute, NUS
9 DEC 2021
Mr Tyrone Tan Department of Biological Sciences, NUS 23 NOV 2021 Rituals and Revolutions Prof Peter van der Veer Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany
Organised with Yale-NUS College, Singapore
Book Discussion on ‘The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanisation of Rural China’ Asst Prof Nick R. Smith Barnard College, Columbia University, USA Assoc Prof Eric C. Thompson Department of Sociology, NUS Dr Yi Jin Asia Research Institute, NUS
7.0 COMMUNITY OUTREACH ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 66
7.0 COMMUNITY OUTREACH
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 67
ARI celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2021 with a roundtable series, which was conducted entirely via zoom due to the pandemic. This enabled the Institute to continue its commitment to sharing research knowledge with the larger community in Singapore and worldwide. Its outreach efforts—locally, regionally and internationally—were carried out throughout the year.
ARI20 ANNIVERSARY ROUNDTABLE SERIES The ARI20 Anniversary Roundtable Series marked the founding of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore in 2001. In celebration of our current scholarship, the series explored how the themes and topics continue to inspire new trajectories of research. The series concluded with a final roundtable of theInstitute’s current research cluster leaders discussing ARI’s role in charting future humanities and social science research on Asia. While the virtual roundtable format was out of necessity due to the pandemic, it enabled ARI alumni and partners around the world to join the discussion on the Institute’s research directions and prospects.
7 SEP 2021 Identity Research in Asia: Past, Present and Future Directions This roundtable provided a forum for our esteemed panellists to reflect on and situate their own personal and professional histories and identities within the body of identities research. Assoc Prof Jamie S. Davidson Asia Research Institute, NUS Prof Srirupa Roy Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany Prof Peter A. Jackson Australian National University, Australia Prof Ien Ang Western Sydney University, Australia
14 SEP 2021 Migration Futures and Transnationalism Scholarship: Pandemic Times, Uncertain Mobilities and the End of the ‘Age of Migration’? As a key conceptualisation in migration studies that came into efflorescence at a time of increasing globalisation, transnationalism has given rise to a richly textured research agenda for migration studies that has gone beyond ‘the nation as container’. The roundtable reflected on the future of this agenda in the light of a slow-down in international travel and the rise of different ways of conducting transnational life. Prof Francis L. Collins University of Waikato, New Zealand Prof Biao Xiang Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany Dr Jolynna Sinanan Western Sydney University, Australia Prof Heather Horst Western Sydney University, Australia Prof Valentina Mazzucato Maastricht University, Netherlands
7.0 COMMUNITY OUTREACH
7.0 COMMUNITY OUTREACH
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ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 69
28 SEP 2021 Representing Disasters from the Inside Out Using the documentary Tsunami of New Dreams as a case study, this roundtable examined methodologies and techniques for investigating a disaster from the inside out. Prof Isaac Kerlow art-science-media, USA Dr Annabel Teh Gallop The British Library, UK Dr Michelle Miller Asia Research Institute, NUS Dr Rizanna Rosemary Syiah Kuala University, Indonesia
5 OCT 2021 Oceanic Asia: Global History, Japanese Waters, and the Edges of Area Studies
12 OCT 2021 Asian Urbanisms: Critical Reflections and New Directions
This roundtable brought together a multi-national and multi-disciplinary group to expand the scope of Asian Studies and, in particular, global Japan’s place within it.
In this roundtable, three former ARI urbanists shared reflections on their own research pathways, and possible ways forward for urban research in the humanities and social sciences.
The cluster brought together its alumni and current staff in an online conference to contribute to dialogues on issues brought about by the unprecedented changes experienced by Asian families, with cuttingedge research in various Asian countries.
Prof Ian Jared Miller Harvard University, USA
Prof Tim Bunnell Asia Research Institute, NUS
Covenors: Prof Wei-Jun Jean Yeung & Dr Jeofrey B. Abalos
Prof Nadin Heé Osaka University, Japan
Dr Limin Hee Centre for Liveable Cities, Singapore
Prof David L. Howell Harvard University, USA
Prof Nausheen Anwar Karachi Urban Lab, Pakistan
Dr Stefan Huebner Asia Research Institute, NUS
Dr Eli Elinoff Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Prof Manako Ogawa Ritsumeikan University, Japan Prof Sujit Sivasundaram University of Cambridge, UK Assoc Prof Takehiro Watanabe Sophia University, Japan
14-15 OCT 2021 Changing Family in Asia
7.0 COMMUNITY OUTREACH
7.0 COMMUNITY OUTREACH
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ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 71
19 OCT 2021 Mapping Changes in Religion and Globalisation across Asia
26 OCT 2021 Science, Technology, and Society (STS) in East and Southeast Asia: Current and Future Directions
The future of the interactions between religion and globalisation will be shaped by new forces, such as the rise of religious nationalism, the ongoing project of secularisation, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on religious life. This roundtable discussed these themes and introduced new approaches to the study of these issues that have been developed in collaboration with international research centres in Europe, the US, and Japan.
This roundtable discussed the recent past and future directions of the interdisciplinary field of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) in East and Southeast Asia. STS is one of the oldest, largest, and most widespread interdisciplinary research and teaching programmes in the world, and its themes and methodologies have never been more relevant given current challenges such as climate change, pandemics, mass extinctions, and issues around AI.
Prof Kenneth Dean Asia Research Institute, NUS Prof Peter van der Veer Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religion and Ethnic Diversity, Germany Prof R. Michael Feener Kyoto University, Japan Dr Carola E. Lorea Asia Research Institute, NUS
Assoc Prof Gregory Clancey Asia Research Institute, NUS Assoc Prof Hyungsub Choi Seoul National University of Science and Technology, Korea
9 NOV 2021 The Idea of Peace in Asia This roundtable discussed how the ‘Asian century’ can emerge in a peaceful manner. The 21st century is being marked by a decline in the primacy of the West and a corresponding return of Asia. After 200 years of Western dominance, Asia is again set to return. However, this return of Asia is also marked by the threat of conflict: between US and China in the South China Sea and Taiwan Straits; between China and India; between China and Japan; and between India and Pakistan. If the rise of Asia is to be peaceful, these potential conflicts need to be managed. Prof Kishore Mahbubani Asia Research Institute, NUS Prof Gungwu Wang National University of Singapore
Prof Wen-Hua Kuo National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan
Ambassador Heng Chee Chan Ambassador-at-Large, Singapore Foreign Ministry
Assoc Prof Wen Ling Hong National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Prof Kanti Prasad Bajpai Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS
Prof Togo Tsukahara Kobe University, Japan Assoc Prof Hallam Stevens Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Assoc Prof Fiona Williamson Singapore Management University
11 NOV 2021 ARI and Asian Futures in Humanities and Social Sciences Research This finale roundtable showcased current research at ARI and considered future trajectories as the Institute enters its third decade. Cluster leaders introduced their research clusters, their clusters’ activities and research agendas, and spoke on key issues that are relevant to Asia now and in the years ahead. Prof Tai Yong Tan Yale-NUS College Assoc Prof Maitrii Aung-Thwin Asia Research Institute ARI Cluster Leaders: Prof Tim Bunnell Assoc Prof Gregory Clancey Assoc Prof Jamie S. Davidson Prof Kenneth Dean Prof Naoko Shimazu Prof Brenda S. A. Yeoh Prof Wei-Jun Jean Yeung
7.0 COMMUNITY OUTREACH
7.0 COMMUNITY OUTREACH
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 72
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 73
NEWSLETTERS AND REPORTS
MEDIA COVERAGE
ARI News, also known as the newsletter, is the Institute’s outreach publication. Issued twice a year (April and October), the newsletter profiles research work, achievements, and updates by ARI Fellows, to be disseminated to the general public. Nineteen years after its first publication in March 2003, the format has also evolved. Currently, each issue features one Main Story, two to three Special Features, award announcements, keynote speeches, book and special issue publications, upcoming events, cluster news, and new ARI staff.
ARI researchers have been active in sharing their expertise and expert views in the media. There are currently 179 (and growing) records of media activities of ARI researchers and these are accessible from the ARI website.
ARI News is disseminated as electronic copies to all current and former ARI staff, fellows, collaborators, current and former panellists and speakers at ARI conferences, the NUS community, and any member of the general public who expresses interest in getting updates on ARI activities. Each issue of the newsletter is also downloadable from the ARI website. The contents of the newsletter are assembled by an in-house ARI committee that is comprised of representatives from various ARI Clusters, Events Team and an editor. The committee meets twice per year to discuss the contents of the newsletter and its format. The committee is responsible for ensuring that the contents of the newsletter represent the wide range of research work conducted by ARI Fellows as part of the continuous effort to connect ARI’s work to the general public.
These activities include interviews of ARI researchers by local and international presses and media, published editorials by ARI researchers and their appearance in public affairs broadcasts as guest speakers.
DIGITAL AND SOCIAL CONNECTIVITY ARI continues to explore new avenues of social media to further enhance its social connectivity with various stakeholders locally, regionally and internationally. ARI’s outreach activities and research findings are shared on the ARI website. The website provides up-to-date information about ARI’s research programmes, events and publications and staff. It also serves as a rich resource for research on Asia studies. In 2021, the Institute continued to grow its sizeable Facebook audience across other social media channels, including Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. ARI’s Facebook page keeps its members updated of the latest developments at ARI, including announcements of upcoming events, new fellowships and new publications. It has a strong following and continues to serve as a popular way for ARI staff, students and alumni to connect and keep in touch with what is happening at ARI. Selected webcasts of ARI lectures, seminars and keynote addresses of flagship events continue to be posted on NUScast channel on YouTube, and shared across ARI’s social media platforms. In 2021, ARI commemorated its 20th anniversary by commissioning an interactive map by data visualisation company Kontinentalist, tracing ARI’s global research networks, and introducing select projects. In addition, a six-part In conversation interview series with six key scholars from ARI’s past and present was produced.
ARISCOPE ARI’s academic blog ARIscope was launched in September 2020. ARIscope publishes short articles, photo essays, interviews and event recordings that provide a window into the wide-ranging, scholarship undertaken at ARI and with collaborators among the Institute’s regional and global networks. ARIscope is a reflection of the scholarly dynamism, innovative thinking and research excellence conducted at ARI. To date, more than 52 articles have been published by past and present ARI researchers and scholars who share ARI’s mission to carry out impactful scholarship on Asia.
8.0 GRANTS AND PROJECTS ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 74
8.0 GRANTS AND PROJECTS
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 75
1 AUGUST 2017 – 31 JULY 2022
MARCH 2020 – SEPTEMBER 2021
SUSTAINABLE GOVERNANCE OF TRANSBOUNDARY ENVIRONMENTAL COMMONS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA David Taylor (Geography, NUS) (PI)
ASIAN NATURES, ALIEN SPECIES: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE Anthony Medrano (Yale-NUS College) (PI); Stefan Huebner (Co-PI)
S$2,578,838 funded by the Singapore Social Science Research Council
S$37,380 funded by HSS Seed Grant (Collaborative Research), NUS (2020/2021)
1 SEPTEMBER 2017 – 28 FEBRUARY 2021
1 APRIL 2020 – 31 DECEMBER 2021
MAKING IDENTITY COUNT IN ASIA: IDENTITY RELATIONS IN SINGAPORE AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD Chong Ja Ian (Political Science, NUS) (PI); Reuben Wong (Political Science, NUS) (Co-PI)
CAPITALS OF THE FUTURE, THEN AND NOW: SINGAPORE AND SOUTHEAST ASIA’S PLANNED ADMINISTRATIVE CENTRES Tim Bunnell (PI); Maitrii Aung-Thwin and Daniel Goh (Co-PIs)
S$865,016 funded by the Singapore Social Science Research Council 2 JANUARY 2018 – 1 JULY 2021 TRANSNATIONAL RELATIONS, AGEING & CARE ETHICS (TRACE) Elaine Ho (PI); Brenda Yeoh, Shirlena Huang (Geography, NUS) and Leng Leng Thang (Japanese Studies, NUS) (Co-PIs) S$802,464 funded by MOE Academic Research Fund Tier 2
S$38,466 funded by HSS Seed Fund (Collaborative Research) 27 JULY 2020 – 31 DECEMBER 2021 CLIMATE GOVERNANCE OF CARBON SINKS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA David Taylor (PI); Michelle Miller (Co-PI) S$39,482 funded by HSS Seed Funding on Climate Change Research 1 AUGUST 2020 – 31 JULY 2022
HEAT IN URBAN ASIA: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE Gregory Clancey (PI)
MAPPING FEMALE RELIGIOUS HERITAGE IN SINGAPORE: CHINESE FEMALE TEMPLES AS SITES OF REGIONAL SOCIO-CULTURAL LINKAGE (19TH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT) Ying Ruo Show (PI); Kenneth Dean (Co-PI)
S$774,128 funded by MOE Academic Research Fund Tier 2
S$92,000 funded by Heritage Research Grant of the National Heritage Board, Singapore
15 OCTOBER 2019 – 14 APRIL 2021
1 AUGUST 2020 – 31 MARCH 2023
SONGS OF THE OLD MADMEN: RECOVERING BAUL SONGS FROM THE NOTE-BOOKS OF 19TH AND 20TH CENTURY BENGALI SAINT-COMPOSERSENDANGERED ARCHIVES PROGRAMME Carola Lorea (PI)
SMART CITIES IN GLOBAL COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE: WORLDLING AND PROVINCIALISING RELATIONSHIPS Byron Miller (PI); Tim Bunnell (Institute Investigator)
1 JULY 2019 – 30 JUNE 2022
£18,760 funded by the British Library, UK
S$20,737.51 funded by University of Calgary
8.0 GRANTS AND PROJECTS
8.0 GRANTS AND PROJECTS
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 76
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 77
31 AUGUST 2020 – 30 AUGUST 2022
15 JANUARY 2021 – 15 JULY 2022
OCTOBER 2021 – SEPTEMBER 2022
HEALTHCARE AND ‘FOODWORK’ AMONG LEFT-BEHIND GRANDPARENTS IN MIGRANT-SENDING VILLAGES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA Brenda Yeoh (PI); Theodora Lam (Co-PI)
INTERNATIONAL STUDENT MOBILITY IN A TIME OF COVID-19: REGIMES, EXPERIENCES AND ASPIRATIONS Kong Chong Ho (PI); Brenda Yeoh (Co-PI)
UWCSEA-APP PARTNERSHIP Kishore Mahbubani (PI); Bertrand Ming Yan Seah (UWCSEA-APP Peace Fellow)
S$100,000 funded by NUS-Global Asia Institute NIHA (NUS Initiative to Improve Health in Asia) Research Grant
S$20,000 funded by HSS Strategic Budget/ HSS Seed Fund 19 JULY 2021 – 14 MARCH 2023
S$6,600 funded by ODPRT UParis Edu Grant
COHESION, COMMUNITY CARE AND CONFIDENCE IN SINGAPOREAN CHINESE TEMPLES AND ASSOCIATIONS AND OTHER ASIAN RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS: THE IMPACTS OF GLOBALISATION AND RELIGIOUS RESPONSES TO THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC Kenneth Dean (PI)
1 JANUARY 2021 – 30 JUNE 2023
S$514,080 funded by Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth
1 JANUARY 2021 – 30 JUNE 2023 GOVERNING DIVERSE CITIES IN EUROPE AND ASIA Camille Schmoll & Kong Chong Ho (PIs); Marie Gibert & Delphine Pagès-El Karoui (Co-PIs)
GOVERNING DIVERSE CITIES IN EUROPE AND ASIA MOOC Camille Schmoll & Kong Chong Ho (PIs); Marie Gibert & Delphine Pagès-El Karoui (Co-PIs) S$38,000 funded by UParis-NUS 2 JANUARY 2021 – 2 JANUARY 2023 CHINESE HUIGUANG IN TRANSITION: CHINA’S RISE AND THE RE-MAKING OF ANCESTRAL COMMUNITIES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA Kenneth Dean (PI) S$127,000 funded by MOE Academic Research Fund Tier 1 4 JANUARY 2021 – 3 JULY 2024 AGEING AND SOCIAL NETWORKS: MAPPING THE LIFE-WORLDS OF OLDER SINGAPOREANS Elaine Ho (PI); Vincent Chua & Chen-Chieh Feng (Co-PIs) S$1,112,112 funded by Social Science Research Council Thematic Grant, Type B
AUGUST 2021 – AUGUST 2023 LINKING THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES TO BIODIVERSITY HISTORY IN SINGAPORE AND SOUTHEAST ASIA Anthony Medrano (PI); Stefan Huebner (Co-PI) S$782,756 funded by Social Science Research Thematic Grant, Type A 1 AUGUST 2021 – 30 JUNE 2023 CHINESE EPIGRAPHY OF SINGAPORE: UNITED TEMPLES 1974-2021 Kenneth Dean (PI); Guan Thye Hue, Caroline Boon Han Chia & Yiran Xue (Co-PIs) S$96,000 funded by Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre 1 SEPTEMBER 2021 – 31 AUGUST 2022 BOLSTERING PARTNERSHIPS TO STUDY THE IMPACT OF CHINA’S BELT AND ROAD Kong Chong Ho (PI); Brenda Yeoh (Co-PI) CA$66,000 funded by SSHTC–CERES University of Toronto
S$50,000 funded by United World College Southeast Asia 1 NOVEMBER 2021 – 31 OCTOBER 2024 BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE (BRI) AND STUDENT MOBILITIES IN CHINA-SOUTHEAST ASIA Kong Chong Ho (PI); Brenda Yeoh (Co-PI) S$698,136 funded by MOE Academic Research Fund Tier 2
9.0 PUBLICATIONS ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 78
9.0 PUBLICATIONS
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 79
A total of 34 monographs, jointly authored books, edited volumes, and special issues and sections were published by ARI scholars and alumni in 2021. Of the 18 edited volumes and special issues and sections, 11 were products of workshops and conferences held and sponsored by ARI from 2014 to 2021. BOOKS AND JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUES The disciplines and specialities of ARI members are remarkably diverse, a diversity which is reflected in the books they produce. Books published in 2021 are detailed below. In some cases, the terms of ARI appointees are shorter than the period required for seeing a book through to publication, and in such instances, two codes are used: *Published during the period of the ARI appointment but based largely on earlier work +Published after the member has left ARI, but based on work wholly or partly done in ARI
Balachandran, Lavanya +Tamils, Social Capital and Educational Marginalization in Singapore: Labouring to Learn 1st edition
New York, Routledge, 2022 Available in Jul 2021
Bernzen, Amelie; Bill Pritchard; Boris Braun; Ben Belton & Jonathan Rigg (guest eds) +Special Section: Geographies of Engagement, Livelihoods and Possibility in South and Southeast Asian Deltas
Bray, Francesca; Gregory Clancey & Annapurna Mamidipudi (guest eds) Special Issue: Building Sites, Crafting Knowledge HoST – Journal of History of Science and Technology 15(2), 2021
Brickell, Katherine; Maryann Bylander; Nithya Natarajan; Laurie Parsons & Brenda S.A. Yeoh (guest eds) Special Issue: Debt, (Un)Freedom, and Development: Lessons from Contemporary Asia Geoforum (online first) DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.02.003
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 42(2), 2021
From ARI co-organised conference Debt, Freedom, and Development: Insights from Asia, 15-16 Jan 2019
Bolotta, Giuseppe +Belittled Citizens: The Cultural Politics of Childhood on Bangkok’s Margins
Bueger, Christian; Timothy Edmunds & Robert McCabe (eds) +Capacity Building for Maritime Security: The Western Indian Ocean Experience
Copenhagen, NIAS Press, 2021
Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021
9.0 PUBLICATIONS
9.0 PUBLICATIONS
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 80
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 81
Chee, Liz P.Y. Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China Duke University Press, 2021
Dines, Nick; Anna Triandafyllidou; Jérémie Molho & Peggy Levitt (guest eds) +Special Section: Managing Cultural Diversity and (Re)defining the National in ‘Global South’ Cities
Linked Lives Elder Care, Migration, and Kinship in Sri Lanka
Michele Ruth Gamburd
Gamburd, Michele Ruth +Linked Lives: Elder Care, Migration, and Kinship in Sri Lanka NJ & London, Rutgers University Press, 2021
Identities 28(6), 2021
Cheng, Yi’En & Sonia Lam-Knott (eds) Youth Politics in Urban Asia New York, Routledge, 2021
Elinoff, Eli +Citizen Designs: City-making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand
Gamburd, Michele Ruth +Saebaeduna Jeevitha (Swarnakanthi Rajapaksha, Trans.)
Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2021
Sri Lanka, Sarasavi, 2022
Elinoff, Eli & Tyson Vaughan (eds) Disastrous Times: Beyond Environmental Crisis in Urbanizing Asia
From ARI organised workshop Marriage Migration, Family and Citizenship in Asia, 31 Jan-1 Feb 2019
From ARI organised workshop The Quotidian Anthropocene: Reconfiguring Environments in Urbanizing Asia, 16-17 Oct 2014
Datta, Arunima +Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya
Fischer-Tiné, Harald; Stefan Huebner & Ian Tyrrell (eds) Spreading Protestant Modernity: Global Perspectives on the Social Work of the YMCA and YWCA, 1889-1970
Cambridge University Press, 2021 Winner of the National Women’s Studies 2021 Whaley Book Award
Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2021
Sinhala translation of Linked Lives: Elder Care, Migration, and Kinship in Sri Lanka (Rutgers UP, 2021)
C H I L D I N D I C AT O R S RESEARCH The official journal of the International Society for Child Indicators (ISCI)
Editors: Asher Ben-Arieh, Bong Joo Lee and Christine Hunner-Kreisel
VOLUME 14 No. 2
April 2021
ISSN 1874-897X
Includes Special Issue: The Value of Children and Social Transformations in Asia Guest Editor:
Xiaorong Gu V OLU M E 14-(2): 477– 896 ( 2021)
Citizenship Studies 25(7), 2021
Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021
Natalie Lang
New York, Berghahn Books, 2021
RELIGION AND PRIDE Hindus in Search of Recognition in La Réunion
C H I LD I N D I C ATO R S RESEA R CH
Chiu, Tuen Yi & Brenda S.A. Yeoh (guest eds) Special Issue: Marriage Migration, Family and Citizenship in Asia
Lang, Natalie Religion and Pride: Hindus in Search of Recognition in La Réunion
Gu, Xiaorong (guest ed) Special Issue: The Value of Children and Social Transformations in Asia Child Indicators Research 14(2), 2021
Lin, Shaun; Naoko Shimazu & James D. Sidaway (guest eds) Special Issue: BRI as Method Forum Asia Pacific Viewpoint 62(3), 2021 From ARI co-organised Roundtable Discussion on BRI as Method: Forging Theoretical Agendas, 14 May 2021
Liu-Farrer, Gracia; Brenda S.A. Yeoh & Michiel Baas (guest eds) Special Issue: The Question of Skill in Cross-Border Labour Mobilities
From ARI organised workshop The Value of Children in Asia: Economy, Family and Public Policies, 8-9 Nov 2018
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47(10), 2021
Gu, Xiaorong (guest ed) Special Issue: The Value Turn in Childhood Sociology
Mahbubani, Kishore Can Singapore Survive?
Current Sociology (online first) DOI: 10.1177/00113921211006102
Singapore, Straits Times Press, 2021
From ARI organised workshop The Value of Children in Asia: Economy, Family and Public Policies, 8-9 Nov 2018
From ARI co-organised conference The Question of Skills in Cross-Border Labour Mobility, 20-21 Sep 2018
2nd edition
MIGRATION AND MARRIAGE IN ASIAN CONTEXTS
Edited by Zheng Mu and Wei-Jun Jean Yeung
mats
Research in Ethnic and Migration Studies Series editor: Paul Statham
MIGRATION AND MARRIAGE IN ASIAN CONTEXTS Edited by Zheng Mu and Wei-Jun Jean Yeung
an informa business
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9.0 PUBLICATIONS
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 82
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 83
Mu, Zheng & Wei-Jun Jean Yeung (eds) Migration and Marriage in Asian Contexts New York, Routledge, 2022 Available in Nov 2021 From ARI organised workshop Migration and Marriage in Asia, 26-27 Jul 2016
Rigg, Jonathan +Rural Development in Southeast Asia: Dispossession, Accumulation and Persistence
Varigonda, Kesava Chandra Society, Resistance and Civil Nuclear Policy in India: Nuclearising the State New York, Routledge, 2021
International Journal of Social Welfare 30(4), 2021
Cambridge University Press, 2021
From ARI organised conference Family Policies in Asia, 21-22 Nov 2019
Paul, Anju Mary & Brenda S.A. Yeoh (guest eds) Special Section: Multinational Migrations
Robertson, Shanti +Temporality in Mobile Lives: Contemporary Asia–Australia Migration and Everyday Time
Varkkey, Helena The Forest for the Palms: Essays on the Politics of Haze and the Environment in Southeast Asia
Global Networks 21(1), 2021
Bristol University Press, 2021
Singapore, ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2021 (Rutgers UP, 2021)
From ARI co-organised conference Multinational Migrations: Onward Migration Patterns and Possibilities in Asia and Beyond, 27-28 Sep 2018
Phu, Thy +Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam Duke University Press, 2021
BM599s ISBN 978-981-4881-86-9
9
Sur, Malini +Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast IndiaBangladesh Border University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021
789814 881869
Wilcox, Phill; Jonathan Rigg & Minh T.N. Nguyen (guest eds) +Special Issue: Rural Life in Late Socialism: Politics of Development and Imaginaries of the Future European Journal of East Asian Studies 20(1), 2021
Ray, Himanshu Prabha +Coastal Shrines and Transnational Maritime Networks Across India and Southeast Asia
Valjakka, Minna (guest ed) Special Issue: Shifting Undergrounds in East and Southeast Asia
London & New York, Routledge, 2021
From ARI co-organised conference Shifting Undergrounds in East and Southeast Asia: Transformations and Declinations of Cultural Self-Expressions and Communities in Cityscape, 25-26 Oct 2018
Cultural Studies 35(1), 2021
Yeung, Wei-Jun Jean; Sonja Drobnič & Wei-Yun Chung (guest eds) Special Issue: Family Policies and Care Regimes in Asia
Yi, Gaofeng; Venni V. Krishna; Xinpei Zhang & Yuheng Jiang +Chinese Universities in the National Innovation System: Academic Entrepreneurship and Ecosystem 1st edition
London, Routledge, 2021
ASIAN POPULATION STUDIES EDITOR Professor Brenda S.A. Yeoh
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9.0 PUBLICATIONS
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 84
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 85
Asian Population Studies is an ARI journal that publishes original research on matters related to population in this large, complex and rapidly changing region, and welcomes substantive empirical analyses, theoretical works, applied research and contributions to methodology. Topics covered include all branches of population studies ranging from population dynamics such as the analysis of fertility, mortality and migration (from both technical and social perspectives) to the consequences of population change. Heading each issue is a commentary on a topical issue by an expert in population issues.
National University of Singapore
ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS Acedera, Kristel Anne Family matters: Negotiating intergenerational mixed identities among Eurasian families in Singapore (with B.S.A. Yeoh, Z.L. Rocha & E. Rootham). Journal of Family Issues 42(8), 1880-1903. DOI: 10.1177/0192513X20957050
National University of Singapore
Asian Population Studies entered its 17th year of publication in 2021. The journal is abstracted and indexed in Current Contents/Social and Behavioral Sciences, Journal Citation Reports/Social Sciences Edition, Scopus, and the Social Sciences Citation Index. The 2020 Impact Factor for APS was 2.324.
When care is near and far: Care triangles and the mediated spaces of mobile phones among Filipino Transnational families (with B.S.A. Yeoh). Geoforum 121, 181-191. DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.02.021
FOUNDING EDITOR
SOME ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN 2021:
Ang, Sylvia
Educational attainment and housework participation among Japanese, Taiwanese, and American women across adult life transitions Kamila Kolpashnikova & Evan T. Koike
Migration and new racism beyond colour and the ‘west’: Co-ethnicity, intersectionality and postcoloniality (with E.L.E. Ho & B.S.A. Yeoh). Ethnic and Racial Studies. DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2021.1925321
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Associate Professor Quishi Feng
Professor Gavin Jones Australian National University
Divorce trends in China across time and space: An update Mengni Chen, Ester Lucia Rizzi & Paul S. F. Yip Does ‘love’ make a difference? Marriage choice and post-marriage decision-making power in India Manjistha Banerji & Ashwini S. Deshpande Factors delaying marriage in Korea: An analysis of the Korean population census data for 1990-2010 Bun Song Lee, Jennifer Klein, Mark Wohar & Sangsin Kim Getting the measurement right! Quantifying time poverty and multitasking from childcare among mothers with children across different age groups in rural north India Laili Irani & Vidya Vemireddy Coping with population ageing in mainland China Xizhe Peng
Sinophobia in the Asian century: Race, nation and othering in Australia and Singapore (with V. Colic-Peisker). Ethnic and Racial Studies. DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2021.1921236 The myth of migrant transience: Racializing new Chinese migrants in mobile Singapore. Mobilities 16(2), 236-248. DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2021.1885835
Arnez, Monika The granularity of sand: Analogies of production, consumption, and distribution. Dialogues in Human Geography 11(2), 298-301. DOI: 10.1177/20438206211004857
Astuti, Rini Governing the ungovernable: The politics of disciplining pulpwood and palm oil plantations in Indonesia’s tropical peatland. Geoforum 124, 381-391. DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.03.004
Hydrosocial rupture: Causes and consequences for transboundary governance (with M.A. Miller, Alfajri, C. Grundy-Warr, C. Middleton, Z.D. Tan & D.M. Taylor). Ecology and Society 26(3). DOI: 10.5751/ES-12545-260321
Baas, Michiel Indian migrant workers and global city Singapore: What determines the preference for and (relative) cost of a migration destination? Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration 5(2), 109-122.
Bingenheimer, Marcus On the use of historical social network analysis in the study of Chinese Buddhism: The case of Dao’an, Huiyuan, and Kumārajīva. Journal of the Japanese Association of Digital Humanities 5(2), 84-131.
Bolotta, Giuseppe A Christmas mourning: Catholicism in postBhumibol Thailand. In P. Chachavalpongpun (ed), At the crossroads. Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia. Kyoto University: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, pp. 54-57. ‘Invisible worldings’: Image and reality in the Thai seafood industry’s humanitarian engagements. European Journal of East Asian Studies 21, 1-26. Riscrivere la storia: la rivoluzione pop dei ‘bambini’ Thailandesi (Rewrite history: Thai ‘children’s’ pop revolution). Relazioni Internazionali e International Political Economy del Sud-Est Asiatico (RISE) 6, 11-15.
Brown, Bernardo Cultural deference, community survival: Sri Lankan Catholicism and the perils of religious nationalism. Social Sciences and Missions 34, 288-309.
Bueger, Christian Conducting field research when there is no ‘field’. Some notes on the praxiographic challenge. In S. Biecker & K. Schlichte (eds), The political anthropology of internationalized politics. UK: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 29-45. Does maritime security require a new United Nations structure? Global Observatory, 26 August 2021. Innovation and new strategic choices: Refreshing the UK’s National Strategy for Maritime Security (with T. Edmunds & S. Edwards). The RUSI Journal 166(4), 66-75. Making grand strategy in practice. In T. Balzaq & R. Krebs (eds), Oxford handbook of grand strategy (with F. Gadinger). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 142-158. Maritime security in the security council. Why the maritime industry needs to pay close attention to recent UN debates. Maritime Executive, 13 August 2021. Pragmatic ordering: Informality, experimentation, and the maritime security agenda (with T. Edmunds). Review of International Studies 47(2), 171-191.
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9.0 PUBLICATIONS
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ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 87
The BRI and beyond: Comparative possibilities of extended Chinese urbanization. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 62(3), 270-273.
Moderating the Impact of nurse emigration on the health sector: The state and policy instrument choice. World Medical & Health Policy. DOI: 10.1002/wmh3.398
Chen, Ningning Active aging in the countryside: Space, place and the performance of work-leisure lifestyles in rural China (with J. Chen & P.C. Ko). Population, Space and Place 27(6), 1-15. Religion in times of crisis: Innovative lay responsesand temporal-spatial reconfigurations of temple rituals in COVID-19 China (with J. Chen & K. Dean). Cultural Geographies. DOI: 10.1177/14744740211020505
Cheng, Yi’En International student mobilities in a contagion: (Im)mobilising higher education? (with R. Sidhu, F.L. Collins, K.C. Ho & B.S.A. Yeoh). Geographical Research 59(3), 313-323.
Bunnell, Tim
Chiu, Tuen Yi
Ordinary geographies of the future. Dialogues in Human Geography 11(2), 325-328.
Discretionary maternal citizenship: State hegemony and resistance of single marriage migrant mothers. Citizenship Studies 25(7), 936-954. DOI: 10.1080/13621025.2021.1968685
Reflections on five years of the Summer Institute in Urban Studies (with K. Ward). Urban Studies 58(4), 863-878.
Constable, Nicole Migrant mothers, rejected refugees and excluded belonging in Hong Kong. Population, Space and Place 27(5), e2475. DOI: 10.1002/psp.2475
Cabanda, Exequiel
Shifting tides. The blue economy and concepts in practice. In P. Ish-Shalom (ed), Concepts at work: On the linguistic infrastructure of world politics. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, pp. 137-156.
Productive tensions? The ‘city’ across geographies of planetary urbanization and the urban age (with R. Martinez & M. Acuto). Urban Geography 42(7), 1011-1022. DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2020.1835128
Shared spaces and ‘throwntogetherness’ in later life: A qualitative GIS study of non-migrant and migrant older adults in Singapore (with E.L.E. Ho, J.A. Liew, G. Zhou, B.S.A. Yeoh & S. Huang). Geoforum 124, 132-143.
Husband-to-wife sexual coercion in crossborder marriage: A power perspective (with A.K.L. Cheung). Current Sociology 69(1), 77-98. DOI: 10.1177/0011392118824358 Marriage migration, family and citizenship in Asia (with B.S.A. Yeoh). Citizenship Studies 25(7), 879-897. DOI: 10.1080/13621025.2021.1968680
Chiu-Shee, Colleen Ending gated communities: The rationales for resistance in China (with B.D. Ryan & L. J. Vale). Housing Studies. DOI: 10.1080/02673037.2021.1950645 From SARS to COVID-19: Digital infrastructures of surveillance and segregation in exceptional times (with S.B. Tan & D. Fabio). Cities. DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2021.103486
Chung, Wei-Yun Gendering distance, gendered housework: Examining the gendered power dynamics through housework allocation in Taiwanese homes. Gender, Place & Culture. DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2021.1974355 Family policies and care regimes in Asia (with W.J. Yeung & S. Drobnič). International Journal of Social Welfare 30(4), 371-384. Same-sex partnership in family policies in Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan. International Journal of Social Welfare 30(4), 465-477.
Cruz-del Rosario, Teresita Human capital development and regional cooperation and integration in the CAREC region: Policy lessons from ASEAN. CAREC Institute Visiting Fellow Program 2021. Human Capital Development Policy Report. Urumqi, Xinjing, People’s Republic of China.
Datta, Arunima Responses to traveling Indian ayahs in nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. Journal of Historical Geography 71(2021), 94-103.
Davidson, Jamie S. Opposition to privatized infrastructure in Indonesia. Review of International Political Economy 28(1), 128-151.
Dayan, Hava Crime diversity: Sociocultural aspects of femicide in Hong Kong. Journal of Interpersonal Violence. DOI: 10.1177/08862605211010494
Clancey, Gregory Introduction: Building sites, crafting knowledge (with F. Bray & A. Mamidipudi). Journal of History of Science and Technology 15(2), 12-16. ‘The way we build’: Craft, innovation, and sustainability in Japanese housecarpentry. Journal of History of Science and Technology 15(2), 63-87.
Dean, Kenneth Religion in times of crisis: Innovative lay responses and temporal-spatial reconfigurations of temple rituals in COVID-19 China (with N. Chen & J. Chen). Cultural Geographies. DOI: 10.1177/14744740211020505
Fong, Siao Yuong Coderey, Céline Myanmar traditional medicine: The making of a national heritage. Modern Asian Studies 55(2), 514-551.
Drama production and audiences as ‘affective superaddressee’ in an illiberal democracy. European Journal of Cultural Studies. DOI: 10.1177/13675494211008642
9.0 PUBLICATIONS
9.0 PUBLICATIONS
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 88
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 89
Fu, Courtney R.
Gupta, Achala
Wearing ethnicity: Nyonya fashion in early twentieth century Singapore. In S. Cheang, E. De Greef & Y. Tagaki (eds), Rethinking fashion globalization: Decolonial critiques and fashion de-globalisation. New York; London: Bloomsbury, pp. 165-190.
Exposing the ‘shadow’: An empirical scrutiny of the ‘shadowing process’ of private tutoring in India. Educational Review. DOI: 10.1080/00131911.2021.1931038
Gu, Xiaorong Afterword: The value of children in the global south: Current contributions and future directions. Current Sociology. DOI: 10.1177/00113921211006108 Complex modernization: The value of children and social transformation in contemporary Vietnam (with T.M.T. Tran & H.D. Nguyen). Child Indicators Research 14(2), 511-536. DOI: 10.1007/s12187-020-09791-z Editor’s introduction: The value of children and social transformation in Asia. Child Indicators Research 14(2), 477-486. DOI: 10.1007/s12187-021-09806-3 Parenting for success: The value of children and intensive parenting in post-reform China. Child Indicators Research 14(2), 555–581. DOI: 10.1007/s12187-020-09746-4. Sacrifice and indebtedness: The intergenerational contract in Chinese rural migrant families. Journal of Family Issues 43(2), 509-533. DOI:10.1177/0192513X21993890 ‘Save the children!’: Governing leftbehind children through family in China’s great migration. Current Sociology. DOI:10.1177/0011392120985874 The case for a value turn in childhood sociology. Current Sociology. DOI: 10.1177/00113921211006102 Why Chinese adolescent girls outperform boys in achievement tests (with W.J. Yeung). Chinese Journal of Sociology 7(2), 109-137. DOI: 10.1177/2057150X211006586 ‘You’re not young anymore!’: Gender, age and the politics of reproduction in postreform China. Asian Bioethics Review 13, 57-76. DOI: 10.1007/s41649-020-00157-9
Social legitimacy of private tutoring: an investigation of institutional and affective educational practices in India. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2020.1868978 Teacher-entrepreneurialism: A case of teacher identity formation in neoliberalizing education space in contemporary India. Critical Studies in Education 62(4), 422-438. DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2019.1708765
More than race: A comparative analysis of ‘new’ Indian and Chinese migration in Singapore (with L. Kathiravelu). Ethnic and Racial Studies. DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2021.1924391 Shared spaces and ‘throwntogetherness’ in later life: A qualitative GIS study of non-migrant and migrant older adults in Singapore (with J.A. Liew, G. Zhou, T.Y. Chiu, B.S.A. Yeoh & S. Huang). Geoforum 124, 132-143. Social geography I: Time and temporality. Progress in Human Geography 45, 16681677. DOI: 10.1177/03091325211009304
Ho, Kong Chong Ho, Elaine Lynn-Ee Border governance in Kachin State, Myanmar: Un/caring states and aspirant state building during humanitarian crises. Modern Asian Studies, 1-22. DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X20000499 Care circulations between Singapore and Myanmar: Balancing eldercare work abroad with care for ageing parents back home (with W. Ting). Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2021.1873111 Informality during migration, ‘conversion’ within and across national spaces: Eliciting moral ambivalence among informal brokers (with W. Ting). Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 46, 944-957. DOI: 10.1111/tran.12460 Intolerable intersectional burdens: A COVID-19 research agenda for social and cultural geographies (with A. Maddrell). Social & Cultural Geography 22, 1-10. DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2020.1837215 Migrant domestic workers and the household division of intimate labour: Reconfiguring eldercare relations in Singapore (with B.S.A. Yeoh, J.A. Liew & S. Huang). Gender, Place & Culture. DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2021.1956435
International student mobilities in a contagion: (Im)mobilising higher education? (with R. Sidhu, Y. Cheng, F. Collins & B.S.A. Yeoh). Geographical Research. DOI: 10.1111/1745-5871.12471 Land and housing in Singapore: Three conversations with Anne Halia. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 80(2), 325-351. DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12394
Insebayeva, Sabina The power of ambiguity: National symbols, nation-building and political legitimacy in Kazakhstan (with N. Insebayeva). Europe-Asia Studies, 1-23. DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2021.1912296
Jin, Yi Informalising formality: The construction of penghuqu in an urban redevelopment project in China. Housing Studies. DOI: 10.1080/02673037.2021.1888888 Postscript: In-pandemic academia, scholarly practices and ethics and care (with H.B. Shin, S.Y. Koh, M. McKenzie, D.Y. Oh & Y. Zhao). In H.B. Shin, M. McKenzie & D.Y. Oh (eds), COVID-19 in Southeast Asia: Insight for a post-pandemic world. London: LSE Press, pp. 291-306.
Lam, Theodora Transnational marriage migration and the negotiation of precarious pathways beyond partial citizenship in Singapore (with B.S.A. Yeoh, H.L. Chee & R. Anant). Citizenship Studies 25(7), 898-917. DOI: 10.1080/13621025.2021.1968681
Hong, Sookyeong Creating new mind, new body: Yōjō as a late Meiji ideology. In T.D. Amos and A. Ishii (eds), Revisiting Japan’s restoration: New approaches to the study of the Meiji transformation. London & New York: Routledge, Chapter 17.
Larson, Erica M. Scaling plural coexistence in Manado: What does it take to remain brothers? In R.W. Hefner & Z.A. Bagir. Indonesian pluralities: Islam, citizenship, and democracy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 37-74.
Huebner, Stefan After Merkel: Germany, the European Union and China. AsiaGlobal Online, 4 Nov 2021. Earth’s amphibious transformation: Tange Kenzo, Buckminster Fuller, and marine urbanization in global environmental thought (1950s-present). Modern Asian Studies. DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X21000251 Earth’s amphibious transformation: Urbanizing Asia’s sea. AsiaGlobal Online, 12 Aug 2021.
Liew, Jian An Migrant domestic workers and the household division of intimate labour: Reconfiguring eldercare relations in Singapore (with B.S.A. Yeoh, E.L.E. Ho & S. Huang). Gender, Place & Culture. DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2021.1956435
Shared spaces and ‘throwntogetherness’ in later life: A qualitative GIS study of non-migrant and migrant older adults in Singapore (with E.L.E. Ho, G. Zhou, T.Y. Chiu, B.S.A. Yeoh & S. Huang). Geoforum 124, 132-143.
Lin, Hongxuan Penan storytelling as indigenous counter-narrations of Malaysian nationstate developmentalism (with Z. Ibrahim). positions: asia critique 29(1), 163-182.
Lorea, Carola A review of ‘City of mirrors: Songs of Lalan Sai’. Religions of South Asia 13(3), 385-387. Remote or unreachable? The gender of connectivity and the challenges of pandemic fieldwork across the Bay of Bengal (with R. Banerjee, F. Aarshe, D. Roy, M.K.B. Oli Bhuiyan & M. Pandey). Society for Cultural Anthropology. https://culanth.org/ fieldsights/remote-or-unreachable-thegender-of-connectivity-and-the-challenges-ofpandemic-fieldwork-across-the-bay-of-bengal The Matua community in Bangladesh: Limits and character of social coexistence (with F. Aarshe & M.K.B. Oli Bhuiyan). Bhabanagara: International Journal of Bengal Studies 13(15), 1623-1647.
Mahbubani, Kishore Civilizations: Fusion or clash? In T.G. Weiss & R. Wilkinson (eds), Global governance futures, 1st edition. London: Routledge, Chapter 5. Evil liberalism versus moral pragmatism. In S. Baru & R. Sharma (eds), A new cold war: Henry Kissinger and the rise of China. UP, India: HarperCollins, Chapter 2. Globalization is dead! Long live globalization! In H. Wang & A. Michie (eds), Consensus or conflict? China and globalization in the 21st century. Singapore: Springer, pp. 309-321.
9.0 PUBLICATIONS
9.0 PUBLICATIONS
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ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 91
Where does the future lie: BRICS or G7? (with K.S. Varigonda). In Enhancing BRICS cooperation: Way forward. Mumbai: Exim Bank India, September 2021, pp. 1-12.
Unequal childhoods in China: Parental education and children’s time use (with S. Hu). Journal of Community Psychology. DOI: 10.1002/jcop.22710
Martinez, Ricardo
On the coattails of globalization: Migration, migrants and COVID-19 in Asia (with D. Suhardiman, J. Rigg, M. Bandur, M. Marschke, N. Pheuangsavanh, M. Sayatham & D. Taylor). Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47(1), 88-109. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2020.1844561
Productive tensions? The ‘city’ across geographies of planetary urbanization and the urban age (with T. Bunnell & M. Acuto). Urban Geography 42(7), 1011-1022. DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2020.1835128
Sustainable development of carbon sinks? Lessons from three types of peatland partnerships in Indonesia (with P. Tonoto & D. Taylor). Sustainable Development. DOI:10.1002/sd.2241
Tactical dissonance: Insurgent autonomy on the Myanmar-China border. American Ethnologist 47(4), 369-386. DOI: 10.1111/amet.12985
Quinton-Brown, Patrick
Miller, Michelle Ann
Molho, Jérémie
A transboundary political ecology of air pollution: Slow violence on Thailand’s margins (with D. Marks). Environmental Policy and Governance. DOI: 10.1002/eet.1976
Becoming Asia’s art market hub: Comparing Singapore and Hong Kong. Arts 10(2). DOI: 2076-0752/10/2/28
A transboundary political ecology of volcanic sand mining. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 112(1), 78-96. DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2021.1914539 Hydrosocial rupture: Causes and consequences for transboundary governance (with Alfajri, R. Astuti, C. Grundy-Warr, C. Middleton, Z.D. Tan & D.M. Taylor). Ecology and Society 26(3), 21. DOI: 10.5751/ES-12545-260321 Making illegality visible: The governance dilemmas created by visualising illegal palm oil plantations in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia (with R. Astuti, A. McGregor, M.D.P. Sukmara, W. Saputra, Sulistyanto & D. Taylor). Land Use Policy 114. DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2021.105942 Market-based commons: Social agroforestry, fire mitigation strategies and green supply chains in Indonesia’s peatlands. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. DOI: 10.1111/tran.12472
Ong, Andrew
Managing cultural diversity and (re)defining the national in ‘global south’ cities (with N. Dines, A. Triandafyllidou & P. Levitt). Identities 28(6), 690-698. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2021.1994756
Internationalist or interventionist? Coercion, self-determination, and humanitarianism in third world practice. International Relations. DOI: 10.1177/00471178211059493
Reeder, Matthew The roots of comparative alterity in Siam: Depicting, describing, and defining the peoples of the world, 1830s-1850s. Modern Asian Studies 55(4), 1065-1111.
Mostowlansky, Till Astronauts of the Western Pamirs: Power, mobility, and disconnection in High Asia. In N.S. Appleton & C. Bennett(eds), Methods, moments, and ethnographic spaces in Asia. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 3-20.
Mu, Zheng Extended gender inequality? Intergenerational coresidence and division of household labor (with S. Hu). Social Science Research, 93. DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2020.102497
Rigg, Jonathan Aspirations undone: Hydropower and the (re)shaping of livelihood pathways in Northern Laos (with D. Suhardiman). Agriculture and Human Values. DOI: 10.1007/s10460-021-10203-3 Geographies of engagement, livelihoods and possibility in South and Southeast Asian deltas (with A. Bernsen, B. Pritchard, B. Braun & B. Belton). Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 42(2), 197-202.
Hui Muslims’ endogamy and intermarriages: Marriage markets, Islamic culture, and economic growth. Journal of Comparative Family Studies 52(4), 540-568. DOI: 10.3138/jcfs.52.4.02
On the coattails of globalization: Migration, migrants and COVID-19 in Asia (with D. Suhardiman, M. Bandur, M. Marschke, M.A. Miller, N. Pheuangsavanh, M. Sayatham & D. Taylor). Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47(1), 88-109. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2020.1844561
The changing patterns and determinants of stay-at-home motherhood in urban China, 1982 to 2015 (with F.F. Tian). Journal of Comparative Family Studies. DOI: 10.3138/jcfs-2021-0065
(Re)constructing state power and livelihoods through the Laos-China Railway project (with D. Suhardiman, J. DiCarlo, O. Keovilignavong & A. Nicol). Geoforum 124, 79-88. DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.06.003
9.0 PUBLICATIONS
9.0 PUBLICATIONS
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ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 93
Retaining the old countryside, embracing the new countryside: Vietnam’s New Rural Development program (with T.A. Nguyen & J. Gillen). Journal of Vietnamese Studies 16(3), 77-110. DOI: 10.1525/vs.2021.16.3.77
Temporal emotion work, gender and aspirations of left-behind youth in Indonesian migrant-sending villages (with B.S.A. Yeoh). Journal of Youth Studies. DOI: 10.1080/13676261.2021.1952170
Wilk, Richard
Rural life in late socialism: Politics of development and imaginaries of the future (with P. Wilcox & M.T.N. Nguyen). European Journal of East Asian Studies 20(1), 7-25. DOI: 10.1163/15700615-20211009
Ting, Wen-Ching
Xu, Hongwei
Care circulations between Singapore and Myanmar: Balancing eldercare work abroad with care for ageing parents back home (with E.L.E. Ho). Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2021.1873111
Sandwiched grandparents and biological health risks in China (with J. Liu, Z. Zhang & L. Li). Journal of Health and Social Behavior. DOI: 10.1177/00221465211069895
Informality during migration, ‘conversion’ within and across national spaces: Eliciting moral ambivalence among informal brokers (with E.L Ho). Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 46, 944-957. DOI: 10.1111/tran.12460
Yang, Yang
Rozario, Philip A. Political discourse and aging in a neoliberal Singapore: Models of citizenship, older adults and policy initiatives (with M. Pizzo). Journal of Aging & Social Policy. DOI: 10.1080/08959420.2020.1851435
Scheer, Catherine Guardians of the forest or evil spirits? Unsettling politicized ontologies in the Cambodian highlands. American Ethnologist 48(4), 489-503.
Shimazu, Naoko Theorising from the Belt and Road Initiative (with S. Lin & J.D. Sidaway). Asia Pacific Viewpoint 62(3), 261-269. DOI: 10.1111/apv.12322
Somaiah, Bittiandra Chand Affiliative emplacement: Festival foodwork among (im) migrant Kodavathee mothers. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 1-18. Cosmopolitan maternalisms. In A. O’Reilly (ed), Maternal theory: Essential readings, 2nd edition. Toronto, Ontario: Demeter Press, pp. 733-744. Rap against brownface and the politics of racism in Singapore (with S. Velayutham). Ethnic and Racial Studies. DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2021.1928253
Valjakka, Minna Affective paragrounds: Alternative envisionings through multidisciplinary contemporary arts in Singapore. Cultural Studies 35(1), 183-209. DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2020.1844264 From material ephemerality to immaterial permanency: The disCONNECT exhibition and the realms of interactive immersiveness. Nuart Journal 3(1), 120-133. NJ5-18_ Valjakka.pdf (nuartjournal.com) Introduction: Shifting undergrounds in East and Southeast Asia. Cultural Studies 35(1), 1-26. DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2020.1844256
Varigonda, Kesava Chandra Where does the future lie: BRICS or G7? (with K. Mahbubani). In Enhancing BRICS cooperation: Way forward. Mumbai, Exim Bank India, September 2021, pp. 1-12.
Fish, identity, and social change. In C. Chou & S. Kerner (eds), Food, social change and identity. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 37-57.
Review forum reading Tim Winter’s Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty-First Century, University of Chicago Press, 2019 (with S. Lin, H. Alff, M.R. Frost, M. Kaneti, T. Oakes, J. Rigg, A. Rippa, J. Wang & T. Winter). Political Geography 84. DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102297 The belt and road initiative as multiple geographies of knowledge production. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 62, 291-294. DOI: 10.1111/apv.12317
Yeoh, Brenda S.A. Conceptual contours of migration studies in and from Asia. International Migration 59(6), 225-233. DOI: 10.1111/imig.12932 Connecting care chains and care diamonds: The eldercare skills regime in Singapore (with Y. Ortiga & K. Wee). Global Networks 21(2), 434-454. DOI: 10.1111/glob.12281 Debt, (un)freedom, and development: Lessons from contemporary Asia (with K. Brickell, M. Bylander, N. Natarajan & L. Parsons). Geoforum. DOI: 10.1016/j. geoforum.2021.02.003 Family matters: Negotiating intergenerational mixed identities among Eurasian families in Singapore (with K. Acedera, Z.L. Rocha & E. Rootham). Journal of Family Issues 42(8), 1880-1903. DOI: 10.1177/0192513X20957050
Family social reproduction: Conflict and compromise in cross-border marriages between Chinese Malaysian men and Vietnamese women (with H.L. Chee). Institutions and Economies 13(4), 93-120. DOI: 10.22452/IJIE.vol13no4.4 Hierarchies of mixedness: Hybridity, mixed-race racisms and belonging for Eurasians in Singapore (with Z.L. Rocha). Ethnic and Racial Studies 45(4), 738-756. DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2021.1921235 International student mobilities in a contagion: (Im)mobilising higher education? (with R. Sidhu, Y. Cheng, F.L. Collins & K.C. Ho). Geographical Research 59(3), 313-323. Managing the complexities of race: Eurasians, classification and mixed racial identities in Singapore (with Z.L. Rocha). Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47(4), 878-894. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2019.1654159 Marriage migration, family and citizenship in Asia (with T.Y. Chiu). Citizenship Studies 25(7), 879-897. DOI: 10.1080/13621025.2021.1968680 Migrant domestic workers and the household division of intimate labour: Reconfiguring eldercare relations in Singapore (with J.A. Liew, E.L.E. Ho & S. Huang). Gender, Place & Culture. DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2021.1956435 Migrants in global cities in Asia and the Gulf: Cosmopolitan dialectics and non-integration (with M. Baas & D. Pagès-El Karoui). City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory and Action 24(5-6), 793-804. DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2020.1843278 Migration. In M. Valverde, K. Clarke, E. Darian-Smith & P. Kotiswaran (eds), Routledge handbook of law and society. London: Routledge, pp. 192-196. Pathological (Im)mobilities: Managing risk in a time of pandemics (with W. Lin). Mobilities 16(1), 96-112. DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2020.1862454
Serial migration, multiple belongings and orientations toward the future: The Perspective of Middle-class Migrants in Singapore (with K. Wee). Journal of Sociology 57(1), 94-110. DOI: 10.1177/1440783320960521 Shared spaces and ‘throwntogetherness’ in later life: A qualitative GIS study of non-migrant and migrant older adults in Singapore (with E.L.E. Ho, J.A. Liew, G. Zhou, T.Y. Chiu & S. Huang). Geoforum 124, 132-143. Social construction of skills: An analytical approach toward the question of skill in cross-border labour mobilities (with G. Liu-Farrer & M. Baas). Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47(10). DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2020.1731983 Studying multinational migrations, speaking back to migration theory (with A.M. Paul). Global Networks 21(1). DOI: 10.1111/glob.12282 Temporal emotion work, gender and aspirations of left-behind youth in Indonesian migrant-sending villages (with B.C. Somaiah). Journal of Youth Studies. DOI: 10.1080/13676261.2021.1952170 Ties that bind, lines that divide: Bangladeshi labour migrants, Malaysian spouses, and the new contours of racialization (with H.L. Chee & W.T. Lai). Ethnic and Racial Studies 45(4), 677-696. DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2021.1921238 Tracing genealogies of mixedness: Social representations and definitions of ‘Eurasian’ in Singapore (with Z.L. Rocha). Genealogy 5(2), 50. DOI: 10.3390/genealogy5020050 Transnational marriage migration and the negotiation of precarious pathways beyond partial citizenship in Singapore (with H.L. Chee, R. Anant & T. Lam). Citizenship Studies 25(7), 898-917. DOI: 10.1080/13621025.2021.1968681
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9.0 PUBLICATIONS
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ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 95
When care is near and far: Care triangles and the mediated spaces of mobile phones among Filipino Transnational families (with K. Acedera). Geoforum 121, 181-191. DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.02.021
Yeung, Wei-Jun Jean Aging in East Asia: New findings on retirement, health, and well-being (with Y. Lee). The Journals of Gerontology: Series B. DOI: 10.1093/geronb/gbab055 Family policies and care regimes in Asia (with W. Chung & S. Drobnič). International Journal of Social Welfare 30(4), 371-384 The country that never retires: The gendered pathways to retirement in South Korea (with Y. Lee). The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 76, 642-655. DOI: 10.1093/geronb/gbaa016 Why Chinese adolescent girls outperform boys in achievement tests (with X. Gu). Chinese Journal of Sociology 7(2), 109-137. DOI: 10.1177/2057150X211006586
Yun, Hae Young Neighborhood built environments, walking, and self-rated health among low-income older adults in St. Paul, Minnesota. Sustainability 13(6), 3501. DOI: 10.3390/su13063501
10.0 ARI RECOGNITION ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 96
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ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 97
AWARDS AND HONOURS
Dr Céline Coderey received the Residential Colleges Teaching Excellence Award 2021 in recognition of her excellence in teaching and learning at the Residential Colleges, awarded by the Residential Colleges Teaching Excellence Committee (RCTEC). The Kishore Mahbubani Professorship was announced on 7 October 2021 by NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, a new professorship named after veteran diplomat Prof Kishore Mahbubani. Assoc Prof Elaine Ho was appointed Vice-Dean of Research, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, NUS, on 1 October 2021. Dr Carola Lorea became Invited External Reviewer for the National Science Centre of Poland (OFS), on 3 March 2021, to be a reviewer of major research grant proposals funded by the Polish government, in the area of history, religion and social studies of South Asia. Prof Naoko Shimazu’s book Postcard Impressions from Early 20th-Century Singapore: Perspectives from the Japanese Community, co-authored with Regina Hong and Xi Min Ling (Singapore, National Library Board, 2020) was awarded the Vermeil Award in the Philatelic Literature Class 11A, at The Philanippon 2021, Yokohama, Japan. As an editorial member of Diplomatica: Journal of Diplomacy and Society, Prof Shimazu initiated the creation of the Mattingly Prize Committee in January 2021. She was also elected to the Thai Asian Studies Association advisory board in April 2021. Dr Kesava Chandra Varigonda was appointed Fellow, International Research Seminar Shifting Geographies of Expertise and Policymaking, at the India-China Institute, The New School, 2021-2022. Prof Brenda Yeoh was elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (BA) in recognition of her international standing for work on migration and development in Asia; migration, family and social reproduction; and transnationalism and cities. In October 2021, she was awarded the highly prestigious Vautrin Lud Prize (Prix International de Géographie Vautrin Lud); and the MND medallion awarded by the Singapore Ministry of National Development. She was also appointed Member, CityScan Steering Committee, 1 January 2021 - 31 December 2022; Member, Environmental Advisory Panel, Mandai Park Holdings, 1 August 2021 - 31 July 2025; Member, Scientific Council, Global Research Institute of Paris (GRIP), Université de Paris; Co-editor, Population, Space and Place, 29 June 2021 31 December 2023; Editorial Board Member, Current Sociology; Editorial Board Member, Genealogy; International Advisory Board Member, Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geografie (TESG or Journal of Social and Economic); and renewed as Chair, Heritage Advisory Panel (HAP), National Heritage Board until 1 December 2024.
KEYNOTES AND PLENARIES
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10.0 ARI RECOGNITION
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Prof Tim Bunnell
Prof Kishore Mahbubani
‘Geographies of the Future City Reconsidered’, the 3rd Sustainable Urban Design for Livable Cities (SUDLiC) Conference on Sustainable Cities for All: Urban Spatial Responses to COVID-19, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 4 August 2021.
‘Can India become stronger than China? Yes, it can’, K.R. Narayanan Birth Centenary Lecture, Institute of Parliamentary Affairs, Government of Kerala, 5 August 2021.
‘Golden Indonesia 2045 in Comparative Perspective: Lessons from Geographical Analysis of Malaysia’s Vision 2020’, International Conference on Geographic Actualization, Universitas PGRI Sumatera Barat, 6 December 2021. Dr Eric Kerr ‘Epistemic Injustices of Trolling’, the 5th Wee Kim Wee SOKA International Seminar on Global Peace and Understanding, Singapore Management University, 21 January 2021. ‘Automation, Memory, and Recording: Thinking about Haw Par Villa through Digital Folklore and Photogrammetry’, Baba House, Singapore, 3 June 2021. Dr Carola Lorea ‘Responses to COVID-19 in South Asia’, Main Spring Event for the Dhar India Studies Programme, Indiana University, 9 March 2021. ‘COVID-19 in South Asia: Ritual innovations and Religious Responses’, Dhar India Studies Centre Distinguished Lecture Series, Indiana University, 10 March 2021. ‘Objectivity and Bias in the Social Sciences’, ISS International School, Singapore, 16 March 2021. ‘Feminist Avataras and Anti-Patriarchal Claims in the Narratives of the Matua Community’, Distinguished Lectures Series, Centre for Women’s Studies, University of Calcutta, 19 August 2021. ‘Ways of Listening, Ways of Knowing’, Communities of Sound: Caste, Religion, and Displacement Across the Bay of Bengal, St Louis University, 22 October 2021. ‘Communities of Sound: Rethinking Global Religion’, University of Tübingen, 13 December 2021.
‘Freeze, Talk & Trade: 3 Principles of Dispute Resolution in Inter-State Disputes’, Singapore Mediation Lecture 2021, Singapore Mediation Centre, 6 September 2021. ‘The Future of US-China Relations – Has China Won?’, RHT CABA-ASEAN Summit 7th edition, RHTLaw Asia, 17 September 2021. Prof Brenda Yeoh ‘Spatial Politics and Transient Migrant Workers in Global-City Singapore, SEAC Lecture, LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, 9 March 2021. ‘The Temporary Migration Regime in Post-Pandemic Times’, 17th Migration Summer School – Migration and the Pandemic: Taking Stock and Thinking Ahead, European University Institute, Florence, Italy, 9 July 2021. ‘The Temporary Migration Regime in Pandemic Times: The Opportunity to Do Things Differently’, 32nd Festival International de Géographie, Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, France, 1-3 October 2021. ‘Asia’s Temporary Migration Regime in a Time of COVID-19’, Sir John Monash Lecture Series 2021, Monash University Malaysia, 11 November 2021.
11.0 SUPPORT FOR UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE STUDIES ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 100
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GRADUATE AND OTHER TEACHING AT NUS In 2021 ARI researchers, mostly those on joint appointment with their respective faculties in NUS, contributed to the University in the following teaching and supervisory roles.
Prof Tim Bunnell: Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, taught GE6770 Graduate Research Seminar. Supervised 2 Honours, 1 Master’s and 7 PhD students, Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dr Yi’En Cheng: FASS Undergraduate Research Opportunity (UROP), Project ‘International Student Mobility in a Time of COVID-19: Regimes, Experiences and Aspirations’, supervised 1 student, Department of Sociology, and 2 students, Department of Geography. Dr Céline Coderey: Tembusu College, taught Junior Seminar UTC1122 Skin, and Senior Seminar UTC2101 Time and Life. Assoc Prof Jamie S. Davidson: Department of Political Science, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, taught PS3236 Ethnicity and Religion in Asian Politics, and PS5312 Approaches to Comparative Politics. Prof Kenneth Dean: Department of Chinese Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, taught CH5245 Seminar in Early Taoism.
Dr Eric Kerr: Tembusu College, taught UTC2108 Knowledge and Expertise, and UTC1102C Fakes. Dr Carola Lorea: Yale-NUS College, guest lecturer for YSS4235 Religion and the Media Turn. External examiner for 1 undergraduate student, UROPS project on refugees, storytelling and resilience, Tembusu College. Dr Michelle Miller: Co-supervised 1 PhD student, Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Prof Naoko Shimazu: Yale-NUS College, coordinated and taught YHU4101 History Major Capstone Seminar. Dr Chand Somaiah: Yale-NUS College, taught YSS2240 Women and Work around the World, Global Affairs. Prof Brenda S.A. Yeoh: Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, taught GE4236 Geographies of Migration.
Supervised 5 PhD students, Department of Chinese Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
Supervised 1 Master’s and 2 PhD students, and co-supervised 1 PhD student, Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
Assoc Prof Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho: Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, taught GE2206 Geographies of Life and Death.
Supervised 1 PhD student, Department of Southeast Asian Studies, and co-supervised 1 PhD student, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
Supervised 1 honours and 3 PhD students, and co-supervised 1 PhD student, Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
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16TH SINGAPORE GRADUATE FORUM ON SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES 12 – 14 Jul 2021, Online via Zoom
ORGANISING COMMITTEE Dr Carola Lorea
CHAIR
Assoc Prof Maitrii Aung-Thwin Dr Céline Coderey Dr Xiaorong Gu Dr Stefan Huebner Dr Michelle Miller Assoc Prof Titima Suthiwan
SECRETARIAT Ms Minghua Tay
In June 2021, 61 students from across the globe joined the AGSF fellowship participants to attend the Masterclasses offered through the AGSF programme and various ice-breaking sessions and activities envisaged to facilitate socialisation and networking among the students. Locked-up students isolated in their respective homes informed us that, in these unusual times of confinement and distancing, the virtual AGSF gave them something to look forward to: it offered a way to socialise and engage in the cyberscape with the international community of Southeast Asia scholars. The fact that the AGSF was conducted virtually did not make this connection less real. Although we could not shake hands and exchange thoughts during the usual coffee breaks, we did use the technologies at our disposal to keep the conversation alive and the network growing. During the welcoming sessions, we offered a virtual tour of ARI and the NUS campus using Google Earth, and we offered interactive online engagements with the students in order to discuss: 1. What are the repercussions of the COVID pandemic in terms of space, time, and topic of their research? 2. What is their imagined future for Southeast Asian studies? 3. What would be the qualities and competences of the ideal Southeast Asian scholar for the next generation of experts? The highlight of the AGSF 2021 was an enhanced and multivocal Skills Based Sessions programme. The first week of the online Forum was dedicated to skills based sessions of a holistic line up of roundtable, talks, and panel discussions that involved over 35 academic speakers. The sessions introduced the students to all the most crucial aspects of academic life, ranging from professional advice on career development such as how to publish in top journals and how to develop a PhD research proposal, to discussions on social justice, disability, well-being and self-care in academia. Despite the constraints of an online event, the AGSF maintained its spirit and its aims: building relationships and connecting resources that can make personal and professional life richer for Southeast Asia scholars. Building upon the virtual experience of the online AGSF 2020, the ARI events team and AGSF Committee have succeeded in making the online event more interactive, engaging, and user-friendly, spreading sessions apart and offering plenty of breaks to avoid Zoom exhaustion and excessive screen time. The new connections among students and between the students and ARI will provide fruitful academic collaborations in the years to come.
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11.0 SUPPORT FOR UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE STUDIES
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ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 105
ASIAN GRADUATE STUDENT FELLOWSHIP PROGRAMME 7 Jun – 16 Jul 2021
The Asian Graduate Student Fellowship Programme brings together brilliant graduate students working on Southeast Asia with the objective of connecting knowledges and nurturing the next generation of Asian Studies scholars. The programme seeks to foster interaction and intellectual exchange among Asian students and between students and the NUS-based academic community, in order to forge a collaborative and dynamic future for the growing field of Asian Studies across the globe. Fellowships are offered to students currently enrolled in a Master’s or PhD course in any Asian country. The awarded students have passed a competitive selection on the basis of the originality and quality of their research proposal. Their research focus must be relevant for the understanding of history, culture, society, identities and contemporary issues in the Southeast Asia region. In pre-COVID times, the students from all over Asia would have physically come to Singapore for six weeks, residing on campus to work on their research and writing skills. Since 2020 this has not been feasible. After making sure that all the students had the means to get connected online on a regular basis, 34 AGSF fellows started a six-week online fellowship programme that included remote access to NUS e-libraries, platforms for socialising and exchanging knowledge such as a Facebook group, breakout room discussions during Zoom meetings, and skill-based sessions.
5-YEAR STATISTICS 2021 Country
Applications Received
2020
Shortlisted
Applications Received
2019
Shortlisted
Applications Received
2018
Shortlisted
Australia Bangladesh
1
Brunei
1
4
Cambodia
2
Canada China
2017
Applications Received
Shortlisted
2
1
3
1
1
1
Applications Received
Shortlisted
1
1
10
1
1 5
2
14
3
Ecuador
8
1
8
1
Hong Kong
2
1
India
11
1
40
1
9
Indonesia
22
12
50
7
43
9
Israel
1
1
1
7
1
2
1
7
1
5
Japan
1
Korea
2
Laos 4
Myanmar
1
3
1
1
1
8
1
11
3
1
1
5
2
1 1
Philippines
10
26
3
4
41
9
43
7
1
1
2
2
1
1
1
1
18
6
1
1
10
4
1
1
1
Nepal Pakistan
1
1
Khmer
Malaysia
1
3 7
14
2
5 4
Poland
17
2 4
22
1
Russia
1
Singapore
2
2
Sri Lanka
1
1
Taiwan
1
1
4
3
2
2
Thailand
7
2
11
2
9
3
Turkey
2
1
5
2
2
USA
2
UK
1
Vietnam
5
2
13
3
20
4
3
3
10
2
TOTAL
76
34
166
28
146
30
131
28
103
28
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ASIAN GRADUATE STUDENTS 2021 MASTER’S STUDENTS Agustiyara: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Khon Kaen University, Thailand. Public administration, governance, and sustainable development. Anindya, Ireisha: Department of Literature, University of Indonesia. How bodies are constructed, practised, and positioned socially, particularly in regard to marginalised people.
PHD STUDENTS Hidayati, Okta Nurul: Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies, Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia. Women’s piety movements and philanthropic activities in Indonesia. Khudi, Achmad Firas: Faculty of Social Sciences, Chiang Mai University, Thailand. Urbanism and development in Southeast Asia.
Chen, Sophia Zhiting: Institute of Humanities, Tsinghua University, China.
Mahadika, Gilang: Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Gadjah Mada University
Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, particularly during the 18th and 20th century.
Migration and precarious labour in neoliberal Indonesia.
Choosiri, Seubsaisiam: Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. History of mainland Southeast Asian countries, especially Thailand, Vietnam and Laos during the Cold War. Dharmawimala, Thavishi Dewanmini: Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. World literatures; cultural studies; cultural linguistics; posthumanism; speculative fiction. Gumiran, Allen Casey: Asian Center, University of Philippines Diliman. Historiography; socio-political philosophy; cultural implications of technology; history of mentalities.
Matorres, Dane Erlo Cristobal: Department of Sociology, University of Philippines. Political ecology of maritime disputes. Natasha, Michaila Shahnez: Faculty of Humanities, University of Indonesia. Gendered inequities; gender-based violence; sexual rights. Paul, Marcus Phillip: Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of Malaya. Social justice; marginalised communities and actin-research in alleviating social challenges for different communities. Sopyan, Imam: Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies, Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia. Muslim youth activism in Indonesia and global Muslim issues.
Shiu, Shiou-Hau: Taipei National University of the Arts, Taiwan.
Candelaria, John Lee: Hiroshima University, Japan.
Queer studies; cultural studies; everyday politics in Asia.
Visual culture; heritage studies; peace and conflict studies; Southeast Asian studies.
Shofiyanti, Lilis: University of Indonesia.
Cheung, Ka Lok: Department of History, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Local culture in relation to globalisation, identity, and contemporary cultural politics of youth.
History of Hong Kong and British colonialism in Asian cities.
Syahfrullah, Appridzani: Department of History, Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia.
Chong, Anthony Alexander: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Malaya.
Labour history; cold war studies; politics in Indonesia.
Deaf identity and culture.
Yudantiasa, Muhammad Radya: Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies, Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia. Religion and media; inter-religious dialogue; religion and democracy; Qur’anic interpretation.
Das, Pratim: Department of Comparative Indian Language and Literature, University of Calcutta. Travelogues; Dalit literature; migration; literary criticism; folk culture. Du, Yufei: Department of Asian and International Studies, City University of Hong Kong. Impact of new Chinese mobility on Hong Kong, Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand. Fu, Yek Ming: Department of Chinese Studies, University of Malaya. Buddhism and religious studies among Chinese communities in Malaysia. Guevarra, Mary Harmony: Department of Literature, De La Salle University of Manila, Philippines. Filipino and Southeast Asian masculinities; migration studies.
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11.0 SUPPORT FOR UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE STUDIES
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ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 109
Hang, Nguyen Thuy: Waseda University, Tokyo.
Sundjaya: Department of Anthropology, University of Indonesia.
International education; language education; higher education; global migration.
Social forestry in Eastern Indonesia in relation to changes in agrarian structure in rural areas.
Hieu, Tran Van: Universitas Andalas, Indonesia. Agricultural economics and natural resources management; sustainable livelihoods. Kitikamdhorn, Abhibhu: Faculty of Communication Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. Information disorder; the infodemic/ disinfodemic in the social media environment.
ARI hosts undergraduates and postgraduates from local and overseas tertiary institutions as interns or research apprentices under the NUS Internship Programme. They join the research work of a cluster or assist in various support roles in the Institute, to gain work experience in a research environment and in professional research practice.
Tan, Ian Yuk Hong: University of Hong Kong. Iron architecture in the former colonial port cities of Calcutta, Singapore and Hong Kong. Teves, Ma. Josephine Therese: Faculty of Political Science, Chulanglongkorn University, Thailand. Rights-based approaches in addressing COVID-19 impacts and sustainable development goals.
INTERN 2021 26 NOV 2020 – 15 JAN 2021 Zhi Qian Lee National University of Singapore
RESEARCH APPRENTICES 2021 23 DEC 2020 – 22 SEP 2021
Ladia, Charles Erize: College of Social Sciences, University of Philippines Diliman. Public addresses; political rhetoric; gender communication; social movements. Mallari, Mary Anne: Department of Literature, De La Salle University of Manila, Philippines. Film studies; postcolonial theory; gender studies and literary criticism. Miagina, Aveanty: Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies, Satya Wacana Christian University, Indonesia. Women’s entrepreneurship and empowerment; the tourism industry in Indonesia. Qiu, Zhenwu: School of Humanities, Tsinghua University, China. Meteorological history; tropical infrastructure and everyday life in the Bay of Bengal.
Caitlin Celestine Fernandez National University of Singapore 1 JUL 2020 – 30 JUN 2021 Alicia Min Chan National University of Singapore 6 JUL 2020 – 31 JAN 2021 Ginny Ming Hui Koh National University of Singapore
12.0 EXTERNAL RELATIONS ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 110
ARI ANNUAL REPORT 2021 • 111
12.0 EXTERNAL RELATIONS
EXTERNAL FUNDING RECEIVED
ORGANISATION
DATE OF AGREEMENT/ AWARD
CONFERENCES & WORKSHOPS/PROJECTS
AMOUNT/ SPONSORSHIP
1
IIAS-SEANNET funded by Henry Luce Foundation
Mar 2021
Building City Knowledge from Neighbourhoods
S$15,000
2
MOE Academic Research Fund Tier 2
Apr 2021
Heat in Urban Asia: Past, Present, and Future
S$2,568
3
Yale-NUS College (Yap Memorial Fund for Comparative Religious Studies)
Apr 2021
Religion and the COVID-19: Mediating Presence and Distance
S$3,000
4
The Henry Luce Foundation
May 2021
Third China Made Workshop: The Social Life of Chinese Infrastructures in Southeast Asia
US$9,300
5
Harvard University Asia Center, USA
Jun 2021
Symposium: Islamic Third Worldism
US$4,000
6
Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council Grant at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Aug 2021
Sending State Regimes and International Skilled Migration: Asian Perspectives in the Age of Global Migration
CA$2,625
7
Yale-NUS College
Oct 2021
Asia’s Wet Natures: Past, Present, and Future
Hosted by Yale-NUS College
8
Various individuals and organisations
The Asian Peace Programme
Total of S$571,560
2021
ARI.NUS.EDU.SG