This paper examines Japanese policies toward different races (minzoku) in Singapore during the Second World War. These policies, which victimized the Chinese community and appeared to favor others such as the Malay and Indian communities, fostered inter-racial resentments that would persist long after the war. Drawing on internal occupation guidelines produced by the Japanese state and the accounts of the administrators who implemented them, this paper shows that the treatment of the Chinese community was in fact a direct result of the perceived significance of these groups to the success or failure of Japan’s wartime imperial project in Southeast Asia. Groups whose importance the Japanese initially dismissed, however, had greater freedom to chart their own destinies and demand Japan live up to its promise of an “Asia for Asians” as the war progressed.

Green spaces are often seen as fostering social cohesion, yet their effects are not uniform. This study examines how neighbourhood context and resident characteristics shape the link between green spaces and community ties. Drawing on survey data from two contrasting Singaporean towns—Punggol, a newer estate with extensive greenery but fewer amenities, and Toa Payoh, a mature town with dense networks of shops and community facilities—we assess both the role of green spaces and the influence of other infrastructures. Three findings stand out. First, residents with strong place attachment gain limited additional benefit from greenery, as their ties are already maintained through everyday encounters. Second, in amenity-rich, walkable neighbourhoods such as Toa Payoh, non-green infrastructures substitute for greenery’s community-building role, while in Punggol, green spaces are central to fostering ties. Third, green spaces are particularly effective for lower-SES residents in Punggol, whose mobility and access to alternatives are more limited. These results show that the social value of green infrastructure is highly contextual and depends on existing neighbourhood features, rather than being uniform across settings.

The role of information and communication technology (ICT) in later life has received substantial attention, with continuous studies focusing on the digital divide for older persons. Literature usually defines and measures the digital divide by focusing on ICT accessibility, skills, and outcomes. This study attempted to expand this framework by further incorporating the role of learning for a more comprehensive perspective of understanding the digital divide at older ages.

We chose the case of Singapore, a society with the highest level of ICT accessibility in the world, to reveal the necessity of introducing this new dimension. With a sample of 2,545 older adults from the Lifelong Education for Aging Productively survey in Singapore, we utilized the latent class analysis (LCA) to categorize 16 indicator variables across 3 core dimensions of the digital gap in daily life: usage, utility, and learning.

The LCA revealed 4 distinct groups: adept users, intermediate users, basic users, and traditional users. 12.9% of older individuals in Singapore were classified as traditional users, characterized by only using landlines and mobile phones for communication with little learning motivation, uncovering a deeper digital gap in Singapore under the new scheme. Regression analyses further showed the strong impacts of socioeconomic status on these types of ICT users.

This study not only underscores the need to highlight the role of learning in understanding the evolving nature of the digital gap but also calls for more significant policy interventions to enhance ICT learning toward digital equity.

Although increasingly prevalent in Singapore, campus sexual assault and harassment and technology-facilitated sexual violence (TFSV) remain underresearched. Conducted by scholars across social work, gender studies, policy studies, communication, and computer science, this interdisciplinary study explores the impact of technologies such as social media and online platforms on the digital well-being of university students in Singapore who experience TFSV and campus sexual misconduct. We conducted online surveys with 314 students and interviews with 28 students, the majority of whom were women and identified as victim-survivors. Our analysis revealed participants did not perceive technologies as entirely detrimental and possessed limited awareness of digital well-being. These findings contribute to understanding young victim-survivors' digital well-being and relationship to technology in Singapore by highlighting the experiences of college students.

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.