By engaging conceptually with the scholarship on narrative analysis and bringing it into dialogue with research on migration narratives, this paper contrasts prevailing economistic narratives on migration with ‘counter-narratives’ (on co-ethnic migration) and ‘absent’ narratives (on ageing migrants). Discussions of migration in Singapore have predominantly centred on skills and wealth differences. Alongside these economistic depictions of migration governance, the politics of co-ethnicity (between past and present migrants from the same source countries) have begun to visibly shape migration and citizenship contestations. Just as important – but hitherto minimally discussed – are less visibly surfaced narratives concerning how different cohorts of migrants are ageing in Singapore. The paper uses news reports, government speeches, social media discussions, arts and cultural sources and wider academic literature to develop the arguments. The discussion demonstrates how competing narratives interact to exhibit the uneven power relations of migration governance. These findings signal that counter-narratives which challenge migration governance can become surfaced in mainstream narratives and trigger policy changes if they are aligned with the master narrative of national belonging. However, narratives that champion the wellbeing of temporary migrants tend to be subsumed or relegated to the informal domain.

This article showcases and explains the process, and the rationale behind the Singapore Fashion Histories website -- an iterative collaborative fashion media site that is dedicated to understanding Singapore's national fashion history. Sponsored by the National Heritage Board, this project takes a multi-sited approach to fashion history in Singapore, one that incorporates and insists on a multiple layering of understanding of what fashion means to a nation.

This article examines the evolution of trade policies in early British Singapore from its founding in 1819 to about 1830. By focusing on this timeframe, it aims to shed light on the important shifts that occurred during this formative period. The article addresses three issues that are key to understanding the trajectory of early British Singapore. First, it explores the reasons behind the dissolution of the original power- and revenue-sharing arrangements between the British, the Temenggong, and Sultan Hussain by 1824. By investigating the reasons behind this termination, the article seeks to uncover the power struggles that (re-) shaped early governance in Singapore. Second, the article examines the roles played by traditional Malay commercial conventions and practices. As a result, a more multi-faceted understanding emerges of Singapore's commercial and cultural origins. Finally, the article investigates the driving forces behind the establishment of British Singapore as a free port supported by free trade. By exploring the motivation, timing and debates about policy, the article provides insights into the economic and political factors that propelled Singapore’s rise as a trading hub. The conclusions in this article offer a thought-provoking reassessment and reframing of Singapore’s early development as a port and British settlement.

This chapter focuses on how Singapore’s under-representation in the Malaysian state institutions resulted in an
extreme outcome. The Chinese-dominant People’s Action Party (PAP) employed two strategies to protect regional interests—which were inclusive of Chinese ethnic interests. Frustrated with limited political representation at the national level, the PAP championed itself as the Chinese partner to be in the ruling coalition. When these overtures
were rebuked, the PAP forged an alternative multiethnic coalition. The Alliance Party saw the PAP’s ability to regroup in in its demands as a threat. And while the PAP was successful in extracting greater autonomy over its regional affairs, it came at an expected price: separation from the federation.

This study examines how Singapore’s flagship newspaper, The Straits Times (ST), framed relationships between migrant workers (MWs) and non-state actors (NGOs, companies and individuals) during the Covid-19 pandemic. We propose the conceptual lens of national wokeness as a mediatisation strategy of positive self-presentation to overcome international criticisms concerning the outbreak of the Covid-19 virus amidst neglected MW dormitories, and to repair the nation’s reputational damage. The study identifies five key discursive themes: Provision, Participation, Awareness, Inclusiveness and Humanisation; the analysis of which shows different shades of wokeness in narrativising Singaporeans’ emergent social consciousness and benevolent efforts to address unmet health and social needs arising from the marginalised status of MWs in Singapore. This study shows how the pandemic offered a rare moment for a nation to pause and potentially reset its apathetic, racist and classist attitudes towards its MWs, and raises for reflection Singaporeans’ longer-term commitment to social change concerning MWs’ welfare after the pandemic passes.

This article examines how middle-class Singaporean migrants in China negotiate mobility, belonging, and non-belonging through experiences of ethnic proximity. Drawing on qualitative research, it shows how ethnic similarity can both enable mobility and produce ambivalence in everyday encounters, shaped by class, temporality, and situational contexts. The study contributes to debates on middling migration, mobile belonging, and the uneven effects of ethnic proximity in transnational settings.

This paper explores the intimate links between food and foodways, sensory experiences, and the manufacturing and sustenance of food heritage in Singapore. Drawing upon a larger project that examined food heritage practices and commensality in two ethnic enclaves, the article focuses on how the senses and their accompanying qualic evaluations play a vital role in food heritage constructions that traverse across different scales of experience and analysis. The broad aim here is to illustrate how food heritage is embodied, participatory, and reconstructed, and shifts across temporalities and varying contexts. By raising sensory awareness that is embroiled within processes of experiencing and reenacting food heritage, such cognizance throws light onto one’s identity, sense of belonging, and connections to place and nation. The senses are therefore catalytic in pronouncing what food heritage entails, and how one may go about tasting archives and eating heritage.

In this chapter, I examine the transformation of Singapore Changi Airport as a result of regional competition during the Cold War. Tracing Singapore’s ambition to become a regional center of investments, tourism, and air traffic, I challenge the conventional understanding of the Cold War as a geopolitical conflict by examining the economic yet peaceful rivalry between two supposed allies in the anticommunist camp through the lens of airports. Ultimately, I suggest that Singapore Changi Airport, with the phallic architecture that is its control tower, was a subtle beacon of peace that helped resolve tensions and facilitate cross-cultural connections—even international cooperation—during the purportedly tense Cold War.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, migrant workers in Singapore endured one of the longest and most stringent periods of confinement globally. Segregationist policies were intensified as the state imposed strict disciplinary regimes over workers’ mobility and everyday lives, framed as public health interventions but functioning also as labor discipline and social control. This study asks: how did migrant workers experience, narrate, and endure life under such conditions of confinement? Drawing on sixteen in-depth interviews with South Asian male construction workers, conducted in dormitories and makeshift worksites, we adopt a grounded theory approach to elicit contextually grounded accounts of life under lockdown. The analysis highlights three interrelated themes: emotional regulation, migrant masculinity and the gendered politics of endurance, and digital connectivity as an affective infrastructure. These practices enabled workers to carve out agentic spaces within structures designed to render them passive. Our findings reveal that even amid fear, surveillance, overcrowding, and economic precarity, workers combined stoicism, transnational kinship ties, religious routines, and solidarity to sustain resilience. While initially guided by Foucauldian notions of surveillance and biopower, the study advances a counter-Foucauldian insight: that institutional control is never total, and migrant narratives of resilience offer nuanced understandings of agency under constrain.

This chapter seeks to understand how the post-industrial developmental state is layering a new cosmopolitan diversity unto the old postcolonial multiracialism in Singapore in the smart town of Punggol and why it is believed this is necessary for urban transformation to an innovative high-tech smart city. We argue that is also important to discuss public reactions to the state project and the experiences of professional migrants who populate and work in these smart towns, and how these could undermine cosmopolitan diversity. Based on findings of our research into the experiences of professional migrant families living in Punggol and the neighbouring Seng Kang town, we argue that the urban planning for cosmopolitan diversity is inadequate. It is not “smart” enough to tackle the deep-seated social relationships between the high-tech migrants and locals emergent in the everyday life of ethnic relations and multiculturalism in the public housing milieu.

Singapore’s postcolonial multiracialism is held together by state policies that categorize its citizens into four major race groups ordered according to their size: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others. This postcolonial framework—with its colonial logics of statal race management and categorization—governs social life in Singapore. Recent race talk has birthed a contentious term—Chinese privilege—that has found its way into common parlance and is now deployed as an explanation for overt and covert racism. “Chinese privilege,” continuous from White privilege, may be understood as the belief that sociopolitical advantages are accorded to those racialized as Chinese. We take cues from Ahmed’s (2004b) notion of “stickiness” to consider how (1) Western ideas of racialized power rooted in Whiteness are reconfigured in postcolonial Singapore and (2) the processes of racialization and racial categorization are uncritically reproduced in invocations of Chinese privilege as censure and confessional. We interpret the notion of sticky raciolinguistics as the inextricability of race-language conaturalization from antecedent centers of White-settler colonial thought.

COVID-19 was not merely a biomedical crisis but a deeply social phenomenon entangled with existing inequalities. Drawing on Peter Kelly's notion of entanglement, we conceptualise the pandemic as an intersectional crisis − where time, structural disadvantage and socio-emotional well-being became interwoven. Using six waves of longitudinal data (2017–2022) from Youth STEPS, a panel study of young people in Singapore, we track within-person changes in life satisfaction across key youth transitions before, during and after the pandemic. Our findings show that the negative effects of unemployment and insecure work on well-being were markedly more severe during the pandemic than in earlier years. Rather than merely revealing inequality, COVID-19 intensified it, with youth facing lower education levels and precarious employment most adversely affected. The pandemic thus acted as a catalyst of unequal disruption − reshaping youth life courses and exacerbating well-being disparities through its entanglement with enduring social and economic structures.