AI Futures at FASS — Brown Bag Session #4 | A/P Vincent Chua and A/P Miguel Escobar Varela
Dear all,
You are cordially invited to the fourth session of the AI Futures at FASS — Brown Bag Sessions series in Semester 1 of AY26/27. Speakers will share one result, challenge, question or provocation about AI in relation to their work. A/P Vincent Chua (NUS Sociology and Anthropology) and A/P Miguel Escobar Varela (NUS English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies) will be presenting on "Debunking the Polanyian Fairytale: How Singapore State-Engineered Its Own Return Swing As Seen Through Singapore’s National Day Rally Speeches (1966–2025)" and "How to ngoprek AI models for cultural specificity" respectively.
AI Futures at FASS — Brown Bag Session #4
Date: 22 October 2026, 12pm-1pm
Venue: Zoom and in-person (FASS Research Division Seminar Room AS7 06-42)
Register: Click to register in person or on Zoom
Lunch will be provided for in-person attendees.
Talk #1: "Debunking the Polanyian Fairytale: How Singapore State-Engineered Its Own Return Swing As Seen Through Singapore’s National Day Rally Speeches (1966–2025)" (A/P Vincent Chua)
Challenging Karl Polanyi’s classical thesis, this talk demonstrates how Singapore's developmental state actively orchestrates its own protective countermovement. Analysing National Day Rally speeches from 1966 to 2025 with AI, we reveal how the state discursively mobilises bridging social capital (“We-society”) to reconcile global market competitiveness with domestic social cohesion.
Talk #2: "How to ngoprek AI models for cultural specificity" (A/P Miguel Escobar Varela)
AI models don’t always capture the nuances that we care about in the humanities, particularly when we work with under-represented intellectual and artistic traditions. However, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) offers a viable means of recalibrating open-weight models toward greater cultural accuracy and auditability. So, my question is: why aren't we doing this more often?
Vincent Chua completed his PhD in Sociology at the University of Toronto (2010). He studies social stratification, investigating how social networks reproduce inequalities across labour markets, education, and communities, alongside research on Singapore’s social capital and political economy.
Miguel ESCOBAR VARELA is Associate Professor at ELTS. He uses computational methods to study cultural heritage in the Malay-Indonesian world. He is Co-Director of the Centre for Computational Social Science and Humanities (CSSH), Co-Convenor of the Minor in Human-AI Systems, and Associate Editor of Computational Humanities Research (Cambridge Journals).