Projects
This research inquires into how young women understand and experience intimacy in the age of social media. Specifically, it looks at negotiations around the institutions of marriage, kinship and work, all three of which are undergoing profound transformation under digital mediation. It is a multi-sited study of young university-going women in four cities: Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Singapore, and Bangalore, chosen for their high percentage of social media usage in Asia among women in the 18-24 age group.
The research (NUS DERC-05032021) proposed that young women understand and experience intimacy in the age of social media is qualitatively different from before the millennial turn and the expansion of digital technologies. By conceptualising intimacy as closeness, familiarity and attachment across a spectrum of relationships including the familial, peer-based and the sexual, the research hypothesize that the experience of digitally mediated intimacy impacts how millennial subjects experience, understand, and negotiate family, marriage, and tertiary education.
Experiences of young women have taken centre-stage in a growing literature that aims to highlight the complexities of social transformation in the twenty-first century (Bragg, Kehily, and Buckingham, 2014; Lukose, 2009; McRobbie, 1991, 2009; Pratt and Rosner, 2012; Wilson, 2012). By focussing on the everyday lives of young women, we aim to shed light on the important interplay of gender, culture, and technology for experiences of rapid social change in these contexts (Hou, 2015; Reed, 2014; Rofel, 1999, 2007; Yan, 2008). The age group of women (18-24) in our study encompasses those characterized as being most active in the digital ecosystem (Palfrey and Gasser, 2008). Scrutinizing their experiences will therefore provide rich and nuanced insight into how digital technologies are being deployed in creating new practices of intimacy and self- representation, and how these in turn are reshaping social relations and social institutions.
For more information, please refer to the poster here.
Check out the city mapping done by the India team here.
Along with the rest of the world, Singapore’s COVID-19 circuit breaker response required many to work-from-home, transforming conventional boundaries between work and home. Suddenly, societies world-wide were confronted with unforeseen challenges and unexpected silver linings of home-based work (HBW). Yet, the pandemic is only a catalyst for this phenomenon, as HBW has been around far beyond it, be it through traditional cottage industries and piecework, or telework spurred by the increased adoption of technology over the last few decades. In Singapore, HBW presents specific challenges particular to the high-density, high-rise environment that accounts for the majority of housing. Our city planning makes clear demarcations between spaces designed and zoned for work and those designed and zoned for living, where houses and housing estates have always been designed for unpaid home life, and not paid work.
What, then, makes the home and neighbourhood operable for various forms of home-based work, be it teleworking, home-based businesses, or freelancing? How do home-based workers adapt to the demands of today’s labour market? How does a resident furnish, use and service their home and their routines to shape the domestic environment for labour? What kind of amenities, environments, or communities near the home are needed to support their work life?
Foundation for Home-Based Work: A Singapore Study (NUS-IRB-2021-799) is an inter-disciplinary project funded by NUS SSRTG, seeking to address these unanswered questions and to understand how home-based work is built into homes and neighbourhoods. The interdisciplinary team, comprising of researchers from the National University’s Department of Architecture, Department of Communications and New Media, and Yale-NUS College, meets this gap with an approach that bridges between the social sciences and design thinking. Find out more about the project and team at foundationsofhomebasedwork.com.
In the wake of the global damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Learning Histories Project delves into the experiences of individuals within the Arts, Culture, and Heritage (ACH) sector. It sheds light on the profound impact of the pandemic on their lives, livelihood, and career trajectories as practitioners and organisations grappled to stay afloat.
Through in-depth interviews and narratives, this project captures the resilience and adaptability of ACH professionals in the face of unprecedented challenges, offering valuable insights into their journey through these turbulent times. More importantly, it also evaluates the effectiveness of government measures aimed at supporting ACH practitioners over the course of the pandemic.
The Learning Histories Project (NUS Ethics application #20210118-01) is funded by the Ministry of Culture, Communication, and Youth (MCCY).
In collaboration with the Communicative City Research Network, this project began as a workshop series that pooled together inter-disciplinary thinkers to examine the social, political, technological and sensorial changes within the communicative city that were triggered by the emergence of the Covid-19 global pandemic.
Research spanning political agency and institutionalisation, technological embeddedness and the urban sensory environment was shared during the 4-day workshop series. They currently exist as working papers and are being reworked for possible publication. For more details, please click here.
Singapore Cinema Heritage
Led by an international team of Asian film studies experts, this project draws from studies in film and cultural policy, Singapore and Asian cinemas, media reception, heritage and digital humanities.
Using Singapore as a case study, this project has four primary aims: (1) to identify the range of cultural institutions that archive film history in Singapore, (2) to examine Singapore’s old movie theatres as sites of film heritage, (3) to investigate how hybrid film events create and augment film memory, and (4) to evaluate audience reception to film archive, movie theatres and film events.
Evaluating Cultural Impact: Precincts, Participation, and Placemaking
Placemaking has become a central policy theme for arts and cultural programming in Singapore. Areas such as the Civic District, Marina Bay, and Bras Basah.Bugis have together seen billion-dollar redevelopment and refurbishment efforts, resulting in new artistic styles and increased cultural participation. However, there is no sustained study on how their cultural impacts have supported place-based belonging and identities.
The Cultural Research Centre will be embarking on Singapore’s first large-scale cultural impact evaluation of placemaking in four arts and cultural precincts – the Civic District, the Bras Basah.Bugis Precinct, Gillman Barracks and Marina Bay. This study will utilise a range of cross-disciplinary quantitative and qualitative methodologies, to contexualise and better understand our local arts and culture placemaking efforts.
Research from this project will be featured in an upcoming Special Issue of City, Culture and Society.
Digital Citizenship in Asia
How do Asia’s youths stake out spaces for their citizenships in digital public spheres? The study of digital citizenship has emerged as an important site of study in the past two decades. Youth, in particular, have emerged as key stakeholders in this field. The Digital Citizenship in Asia grant project builds on, but breaks away, from studies done on youth living in developed Western countries with more stable democrartic and civic engagements. Rather, it works out how youth in Asian societies from (among others) China, Hong Kong, India, the Phillipines, and Singapore actively participate and engage in digital citizenship. The Project bases its frameworks of inquiry from work which breaks away from normative ideas of citizenship in favour. These frameworks see the process as multidimensional and non-linear “fluid interface” which remake the idea of citizenship for a digitally deterritorialised era.
Research from this project has resulted in a special issue of Re Feng (September 2019), viewable here.
You can also check out the full publication here:
Yue, A., & Beta, A. R. (2022). Digital citizenship in Asia: A critical introduction. International Communication Gazette, 84(4), 279–286. https://doi.org/10.1177/17480485221094100