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.

There has been a long-standing debate about whether cheating is a stable behavior across various situations. However, there is a notable gap in our understanding about whether children’s cheating behavior could exhibit stability over time. Moreover, research on the cognitive correlates of children’s cheating is limited, yet exploring these cognitive factors is essential for understanding how children make (dis)honest decisions. This study aimed to test the longitudinal stability in children’s cheating tendency and frequency and to explore the cognitive underpinnings of cheating behavior (theory of mind, inhibitory control, and free will belief). The study involved 100 children aged 3 to 6 years who were initially tested at Time 1, and 89 of these participants were retested at Time 2 approximately 1 year later. Cheating behavior was measured using a die-rolling game over Zoom, and three different cognitive abilities were measured. The results indicated that children’s cheating tendency was stable over a year-long interval, whereas cheating frequency did not show longitudinal stability. Moreover, the study found that free will belief was related to cheating behavior, whereas theory of mind and inhibitory control were not. Specifically, children’s belief in the free will to inhibit their desires, rather than their actual ability to inhibit the desires, was associated with a reduced frequency and likelihood of cheating. The findings can provide insight into the developmental origin of children’s decisions to refrain from cheating.

There have recently been growing global concerns about misinformation, and more specifically about how deepfake technologies have been used to run disinformation campaigns. These concerns, in turn, have influenced people's perceptions of deepfakes, often associating them with threats to democracy and fostering less positive views. But does high trust in government mitigate these influences, thereby strengthening positive perceptions of deepfakes? In a cross-national survey conducted in Malaysia, Singapore, and India, we found no evidence of a negative association either between concern about the spread of misinformation online or perceived risks of AI to democracy, with positive attitudes towards deepfakes. However, when accounting for the moderating factor of trust in government, respondents in Singapore who have high trust levels exhibited more positive attitudes towards deepfakes, despite their concerns about misinformation. Similarly, higher trust in government correlated with more favorable perceptions of deepfakes even among those who view AI as a risk to democracy; this effect is evident across all three countries. In the conclusion, we spell out the implications of these findings for politics in Asia and beyond.

This article examines an alternative model of smart city formation, one based on the principle of insourcing technical competencies and capabilities to those responsible for city governance. This model counters the logic of technological outsourcing upon which many assumptions and critiques of the smart city rest, and thus reveals ways in which a more generative discourse can be forged. Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews with senior stakeholders from public and private sector organizations, we develop a case study of Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative. Through coordinated efforts to reorganize the public sector’s technological functions, develop nation-wide skills upgrading programs, and repatriate overseas tech talent, the government strives to assemble an ideo-technical ecosystem of talent, skills, and civic-mindedness in Singapore. This is an ecosystem designed to establish the public sector as the driver of urban innovation, and thus maximize the benefits of “civic tech”.

This paper is a sociolinguistic study of the linguistic landscape of signboards in Singapore hawker centres. It examines the language(s) displayed on the signboards of 2,145 stalls in the 20 largest hawker centres in Singapore. Hawker centres in Singapore are open-air eating places patronised by thousands of people each day. With less government intervention in the languages that can be displayed on hawker centre signboards, the signs reflect the languages used and identities adopted by the masses in a multilingual setting. This language ecology enables us to observe how languages interact at individual and societal levels in hawker centres and how linguistic diversity is maintained despite the apparent widespread use of English in Singapore. We examine how besides the monolingual, bilingual and multilingual and hybrid signboards, hawker centres are unique habitats in this language ecology where non-Mandarin dialects are preserved, and traditional Chinese characters are commonly seen, in a globalised Singapore. The hawker centres showcase a linguistic landscape of identity, diversity, and continuity.