August 25, 2020

Women’s Equality Day falls on the 26th of August each year, and is typically celebrated in the United States to commemorate women’s right to vote that came with the 19^th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1878. In Singapore, the nation’s leading gender and equality advocacy group is the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE), that works for the welfare of women who are less privileged on issues such as education, domestic violence and abuse, and issues relating to divorce.

In the article, “From Pedagogy to Activism: The AWARE Saga” (Australian Feminist Studies, 2012), A/P Chitra Sankaran and A/P Chng Huang Hoon (both from the NUS Department of English Language and Literature) address the state of activism and participatory politics in Singapore – a nation with a citizenry that has often been characterised as socially and politically apathetic and subservient to official agendas – through the AWARE Saga.

The article explains that the AWARE Saga had occurred in 2009, when hundreds of people showed up at the annual general meeting (AGM) – of an organisation that until that point had been small and quiet – to elect into the executive council six new members. This was seen as an attempt by a religiously motivated group to enter a civil space to forward its own religious agenda. As a result, thousands of supporters returned to AWARE in the next Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) to elect the old leaders of AWARE, to return AWARE to its original agenda that it had always set out to do. A/P Sankaran and A/P Chng explained that the events that unfolded were followed by much media fervour, and what was a proud moment for Singaporean women.

For A/P Sankaran and A/P Chng who jointly taught a senior class in the NUS English Language and Literature department on feminist theory, the AWARE saga brought to fruition a way for their students to translate the theory that they had been taught into practice. Both educators reported that many of their students had independently mobilised via the internet to take action, with email messages and online entries garnering support for the ‘old guard’ of AWARE. A/P Sankaran and A/P Chng state that to see how academic feminism translates to real-life action was not just gratifying for themselves as educators, but also for their students.

Read the full article here.