SRN BOOK TALK

Temple Tracks:

Labour, Piety, and Railway Construction in Asia

Dr Vineeta Sinha

Professor, NUS Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Date & Time: Friday 25 April, 3 to 5pm

Venue: NUS FASS RD Seminar Room (#6-42)/Zoom

Venue Address: NUS AS7 Shaw Foundation Building, 5 Arts Link, 117570

Directions: To get to the Research Division Seminar Room, go to Level 6 of the AS7 Shaw Foundation Building and turn right after exiting the lift, going around the corridor past the washrooms. Turn left and you will see the Research Division Seminar Room directly ahead.

Registration
Eventbrite (in-person)
Zoom (online)

Programme
Download here.

About the Book

The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Temple Tracks critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnational mobilities with religion. In Malaysia and Singapore, evidence of religion-making and railway-building from a colonial past is visible in multiple modes and media as memories, recollections and ‘traces’. Get the book here.

About the Author

I am an ethnographer at heart and committed to qualitative research methodologies. In terms of disciplinary grounding, my work cuts across multiple disciplines from sociology, anthropology, history and area studies, which has enriched my approach to learning, researching and teaching. The Department of Sociology at NUS is special to me for several reasons. This is where I was exposed, first as an undergraduate and then a master’s student, to the disciplines of sociology and anthropology and to a group of inspiring teachers. This is also now a place where I practice my craft – teaching and undertaking sociological and anthropological research – with great personal satisfaction. The dual disciplinary grounding, which lies at the core of my intellectual inheritance, has enriched my training as an ethnographer and enabled me to draw on the strengths of both fields of study.

About the Chair

Qiushi FENG is an Associate Professor at the NUS Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the acting Vice Dean of Research at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. His research fields are ageing and health, population studies, and economic sociology. He is the Co-editor of Current Sociology and Associate Editor of Asian Population Studies. His research has been supported by the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF), the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE), and the National Medical Research Council (NMRC). He is currently leading the MOE Tier-2 project, Analyses and Projections of Households and Living Arrangements in Six ASEAN Countries (HOUSEHOLD-ASEAN). He is the PI in charge of social determinants of health for SG70, a multidisciplinary project on ageing launched by NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.