JULIAN BAXTER

PhD Student

Research Title: Smart Homes, Quiet Power: Surveillance, Subjectivity, and the State in Singapore’s Public Housing
Research Group: Social and Cultural Geography
Thesis Advisor: Dr Dylan Brady

My research examines how public housing is being reshaped through digital infrastructure embedded in everyday life. I’m interested in the gap between residents who actively engage with these 'smart' systems and those who do not or cannot, and what this asymmetry reveals about the reach of digital governance in ambitious state-led urbanisation projects.

This research extends work I began during my MPhil, which examined Singapore's HDB public housing in the post-independence period. Returning to that built environment, now refracted through the lens of data infrastructure and citizen subjectivity, is a natural continuation of the same questions about how states shape the lives of the people they house.

Before NUS, I read Architecture and Urban Planning at Newcastle University and Architecture and Urban Studies at Cambridge. I also spent several years as a policy adviser at the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, working on cyber policy and international governance, which informs how I think about the relationship between technical infrastructure and political power.