LIM YUN

PhD Student

Research Title: Digitised Desires in the ‘Safe’ City: Geographies of Women’s Fear and Vulnerability in Public Space
Research Group: Social and Cultural Geographies (SCG)
Thesis Advisor: Assoc Prof Kamalini Ramdas

With an academic background in sociology, my research integrates interdisciplinary insights at the intersection of feminist geography, embodiment, and affect studies. My research interests centre upon questions of gender, sexuality, and the city, exploring how these dimensions interact to shape lived urban experiences.

My doctoral research explores how technology-facilitated sexual violence is reshaping perceptions of safety in Singapore, highlighting the spillover of digital harms into everyday urban life. Despite the rhetoric of a safe city, the burgeoning cases of technology-facilitated sexual violence in Singapore expose the limits of safety paradigms grounded solely in the physical, urging a rethinking of safety across technosocial geographies.

My research foregrounds the need to grapple with the offshoots, variants, and adherents of technology-facilitated sexual violence in contending with emergent landscapes of fear and vulnerability. Grounded in an understanding of how women’s safety is shaped by such intersecting and compounded vulnerabilities, my research hopes to stimulate a reframing of urban policy, public safety strategies, and technological regulation to foster environments that are not only ostensibly safe, but also affectively felt as safe.