This article reflects upon an international collaboration between supervision experts from South Africa, Hong Kong and New Zealand with the Singapore Association of Social Workers. This collaboration was focused on developing the supervision of supervisory practice. An overview of social work supervision in Singapore is discussed, followed by the process of developing the programme content, delivering training and providing consultation on creating a curriculum. The outcomes include supervision guidelines, curriculum development and further cross-national collaborations. The article concludes by discussing the learning from this international collaboration.

This article explores how the volumetric characteristics of cloud computing can create new expressions of territoriality, which in turn can reveal new axes of vulnerability and threat. Whilst recent work in political geography has sought to “locate” the cloud through analyses of data centre geographies and data-driven processes of smart urbanism, we look beyond the material plane and consider the amorphous territorialities of voluminous data instead. As much as these data are acted on by the legal-regulatory mechanics of the state in a bid to territorialise them, so too do these data volumes serve to cloud, and thus obscure, territory. Processes of territorialising and clouding exist in a state of dialectical tension with each other, and reveal the volumetric vulnerabilities of cloud computing. We validate these theoretical claims through an analysis of in-depth interviews with senior stakeholders in Singapore's Smart Nation initiative. In Singapore, defending the city is equivalent to defending the nation, which causes the military to play an outsized role in securing the city-state. We consider how the attack surface of the city becomes a more voluminous construct with cloud computing, how strategies of geofencing attempt to secure the cloud, and how these processes reveal the increasingly militarised conjunctures of everyday life. Overall, these insights reveal a need for political geography to continually evolve its theoretical premises in line with the rapid digitalisation of the world.

Voluntary associations reduced traditional volunteer activities because of governmental restrictions on face-to-face social interactions that aimed to control the spread of the coronavirus disease during the pandemic. Therefore it is expected that those whose level of satisfaction in organized volunteerism was high took alternative ways, such as donative behaviors, to practice their altruistic values. The study used data from the Individual Giving Study in Singapore, which was administered in 2021 when the pandemic hit the country hard. The study utilized a Latent Class Analysis (LCA) of the Volunteer Satisfaction Index (Galindo-Kuhn, and Guzley, 2001. Journal of Social Service Research 28:45–68). The LCA identified five subgroups of the current and former volunteers. The multivariable regression results showed that a minority of volunteers with the highest overall satisfaction (14%) or the high participation efficacy and group integration satisfaction (13%) were more likely to donate. The results demonstrated that volunteer satisfaction may encourage volunteers to donate generously to more causes despite the impact of a pandemic. In conclusion, volunteer satisfaction was positively associated with donation during the pandemic when onsite and face-to-face volunteering was limited.

This chapter identifies a challenge and offers a solution. The challenge is the polarization manifesting in mature economies, with a growing social divide between class groups – the (global) elites and the rest (the so-called 1% versus the 99%). Responding to this challenge, the chapter proposes three ways to foster an inclusive society amidst forces of fragmentation. First, the establishment of common frames of reference has the potential to unite diverse groups. Second, the promotion of voluntary associational life contributes to social learning, sociability, and a more extensive connectivity between sectors of society. Third, the intentional building of personal communities based on the principles of diversity can produce, as the eventual outcome, a more inclusive and cohesive society manifesting as a shared sense of national belongingness. The Singaporean model is based on the principle that spatial proximity breeds social proximity.

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected individuals' daily lives. The reduction in mobility, decreased social interactions, and heightened uncertainty, negatively affected the public's emotional well-being. As restrictions eased, many countries transitioned towards a new normal. Understanding the connection between public attitude and urban mobility during the recovery phase is crucial for the planning of resilience urban environment. This study investigates the changes in urban mobility and public attitudes by analyzing public transportation and social media data. Findings indicate a significant increase in mobility during the recovery compared to the semi-lockdown period, with better resilience to subsequent outbreaks. Commercial areas and major public transit interchanges exhibited stronger recovery in mobility after new (sub)variants waves. Train mobility demonstrated robust recovery. Relaxation in April 2022 played a crucial role in increased mobility and reduced negative feelings. This policy shift contributed to a surge in positive emotions, particularly in locations where individuals could engage in social and recreational activities. Moreover, the increased beyond-neighborhood mobility was related to decreased negative emotions during the easing of restrictions. Commuting behaviors exhibited long-term changes after 30 months from the initial outbreak, e.g., preference shifted to trains from buses and reduced visits to destinations for international travel.

This study examines how young, unmarried, working people’s fertility intention is shaped by future scenarios where flexible working arrangements (FWAs) are the default. The unmarried population remains to be an under-studied part of the working population at reproductive ages, who nevertheless becomes increasingly significant for fertility research due to rising ages at marriage and the first birth. Despite significant public anticipation regarding the potential of FWAs to facilitate work–family balance and fertility, there is little research on the effects of FWAs on fertility intentions. We conduct a population-based vignette survey experiment to identify the causal effects of FWAs by randomly manipulating three scenarios of FWAs policy changes—reducing hours, increasing work-schedule flexibility, and increasing workplace flexibility—in Singapore, where both overwork norm and low fertility co-exist. All three types of FWAs improve fertility intentions. The effects are especially substantial for women, for which anticipated work–family conflict is an important mediator. Moreover, FWAs matter particularly to those in professional and managerial occupations. These findings call for policies facilitating a more family-friendly environment to tackle low fertility in the future of work.

Accounts of Singapore’s past often begin with the establishment of a British trading station on the island in 1819, but what took place there in the early modern period, and what did Europeans know about the island and its surroundings? To answer these questions, Benjamin Khoo and Peter Borschberg examined more than 400 European travel accounts written in Latin and various vernacular languages between 1500 and the early 1800s, and published in encyclopaedias, dictionaries, and compendia. At the start of this period, Information on the region was surprisingly abundant but often unreliable; by 1800 European publications contained accurate accounts of Singapore and the Straits region based on detailed first-hand accounts. Their findings reveal much about knowledge production in Europe and show Singapore’s early role in regional trade in a fresh light.

This chapter examines how cognitive abilities and social traits shape cognitive style (CS) in college students and the implications of this for assessment and feedback practices in higher education. The nature of assessment has the potential to impact the development of students’ CSs, and similarly, students bring to assessment their own ways of processing information. We specifically explore the potential influence of higher education in shaping a higher-order CS profile of Singaporean college students by focusing on three studies within the Singaporean context. Studies 1 and 2 explored the contribution of visual abilities and social dominance, respectively, to higher-order CSs of Singaporean undergraduates. Study 3 compared CS profiles of Singaporean college and secondary school students. The results suggest that Singapore’s education system plays a significant role in promoting the development of a specific CS profile (rule-based, compartmentalised, internal locus of processing) among secondary school and higher education college students, consistent with professional scientists’ CS profile. In contrast, visual abilities and social dominance traits were found to play only a minor role in the development of higher-order CSs, where only context dependency-independency was significantly predicted by social dominance traits, suggesting that dominant and competitive individuals are also more context-dependent. These three studies highlight important implications for assessment and feedback practices by showing the importance of each specific CS dimension in designing curricula, including assessments within higher education and promoting learning and creativity.

In a post-pandemic world of escalating tensions between China and the West, increasing numbers of students from China are eschewing Western destinations for places in Asia, including Singapore. For these migrants, this Chinese-majority city-state has emerged as an important geoeducational hub between China and the West. A portmanteau of geopolitics and education, the term geoeducational refers to the reciprocal effects of both. Employing an anthropological approach, this article theorizes the geoeducational as a crucial subdomain of the geosocial—a concept proposed by geographers to analyze how social subjects and spaces are influenced by and impact geopolitics and geoeconomics. Using ethnographic interviews and observations, I argue that Singapore’s emergent junctional position helps Chinese student migrants navigate their geoeducational dilemmas. These dilemmas are conditioned by rising US-China superpower competition amid economic stagnation in China and growing xenophobia in the West. Under these conditions, many students see Singapore as a safe liminal place from which they can pursue security, flexibility, freedom, cultural belonging, and family togetherness—by “springboarding” to the West, returning to China, or remaining in Singapore. This article contributes to the mobilities turn in education studies and enhances understanding of multiple migration—migration characterized by multiple changes in destination—by analyzing the interplay between domestic and transnational movements. The geoeducational lens it develops is useful for illuminating international student mobilities cross-culturally and comparatively as well as investigating their systematic interrelationships, including implications for demographic change, brain drain and gain, university financing and rankings, and hypercompetition in a time of eroding meritocracy.

Understanding the interactions between older adults and their living spaces is an important research topic within the human dy- namics of geographical scholarship because of their implications on the quality of aging. The prevailing theory of aging tends to stress aging in place which associates aging well with the home and community, thus inadvertently privileging residential neighbor- hoods as the focal point where older adults spend most of their time. Recent studies have, however, suggested that older adults also age in (social) networks that extend beyond their neighborhoods' physical locations. The need to incorporate perspectives on aging in networks has challenged the prioritization and the enforcement of absolute (or physical) space in GIS software. This study inves- tigates the potential for integrating four top-level spaces (absolute, relative, relational, and mental) to capture different dimensions of older adults' everyday lives. By leveraging on a dataset of older adults in Singapore, this study demonstrates how the four spaces com- bined facilitates understanding of aging, specifically their activity spaces, that would otherwise be achieved in a fragmented manner.

This study examined how the number of hours of early childhood education (ECE) is associated with young children’s behavior problems and early academic achievement in Singapore, a non-WEIRD (“Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic”) country with families using long ECE hours. We drew data from the Singapore Longitudinal Early Development Study. Participants were 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 2,452). General linear models and spline regressions were utilized to analyze how ECE hours were associated with children’s behavior problems and early academic achievement while controlling for child and family characteristics. On average, Singaporean children stayed 41.07 hours per week in ECE centers, with 38 % of the sampled children spending more than 50 hours per week in ECE centers. Notably, we found an inverted-U-shaped relation between ECE hours and child outcomes with a turning point of approximately 35–40 hours per week. Before the turning point, a greater number of hours in ECE was associated with more externalizing problems and higher academic achievement. However, after this point, a greater number of hours was associated with fewer behavior problems, both externalizing and internalizing, as well as poorer academic achievement. These findings demonstrate a complex nonlinear association between ECE hours and child outcomes in a context of children spending pro- longed hours in centers.

The decline in fertility is a pressing issue for most advanced economies. Previous studies on fertility have not paid enough attention to politics. This study investigates the role of political efficacy on people’s fertility intentions in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore – three advanced economies with different political regimes. We also uncover how such a relationship varies depending on people’s political attitudes. This study gathered data from three online surveys with a factorial experiment design in Hong Kong (N = 1895), Taiwan (N = 1971), and Singapore (N = 1985). The results of random-intercept regression analyses show that the impact of political efficacy varies depending on the context. The results indicate that political efficacy positively impacts fertility intentions in Hong Kong and Taiwan, where there are active political movements, especially among those who support democratic values. In Singapore, where there is a lack of active political movements, political efficacy has a lesser impact on fertility intentions. In modern societies with advanced economies and influential political voices from civil society, promoting citizens’ involvement in policymaking may be a beneficial strategy to increase fertility rates.