1) Self introduction

While revolutions are slow simmering affairs, occurring only after decades of oppression and poverty, the precise moment of its unleashing is often a moment of fateful mishap. Realizing the issues behind having physically distinct but politically blurry borders between nations was probably the accidental catalyst for my decision to pursue sociology despite parental objections. It began as early as primary school, where my awareness of issues of citizenship and nationalism was cultivated by my identity as a Malaysian Chinese growing up in Singapore. Being made to recite the Singaporean pledge every morning was seemingly a travesty for the eight-year-old me, and I confronted an authoritarian teacher with firm declarations of my Malaysian citizenship during morning assembly.

Youthful rebelliousness aside, this nationalist sensitivity has played a big role of my formative years. I remember the hardship endured by my working class parents who put their son through university despite the disadvantages they anxiously face as diasporic Malaysians in the protectionist labour market of Singapore. Under such circumstances, my parents’ attitudes toward the enterprise of education were unsurprisingly pragmatic. Heeding their dictum that schooling is primarily a means to a good job, I positioned my junior college education with a subject concentration in business administration and economics, only to discover my passion for sociology later. I found the social sciences gratifying in its embedment within the complex nexus of philosophical and theoretical debates, and its grounding in empirical research. It also offered me exciting tools to make sense of my own biography in the age of flexible citizenships (I am now Singaporean) and growing up in a “soft-authoritarian” regime. One semester into university, I swapped subject majors despite my parents’ insistence on a “practical” degree and have not looked back since.

2) Email address

3) Thesis research

Technologies of Democracy: Discursive Shifts, Pastoral Power and Civil Society in Malaysia and Singapore

When the civil societies of Malaysia and Singapore are compared in terms of their diversity and numbers, why is Malaysia’s civil society more vibrant than Singapore’s despite their similar emergence from British colonialism? Adopting a Foucauldian approach, I consider citizenship in late modernity to be a cultural process of subject formation where fields of surveillance, discipline and administration, work alongside global capital to extract docility and utility from the body-politic. Democratic citizenship, and the attendant participation in civil society prescribed by liberal democratic discourse, is less a solution to political problems than a strategy of government. Such a reconceptualization of power relations suggests that the citizen-subject is both an effect and an instrument of power, and that democracy should be measured by how politics and power contingently produce citizen-subjects at the everyday level, resulting in an “injured citizenship”.

Drawing from comparative research on selected NGOs working with women and migrant labour displaced by neoliberal capitalism, I argue that the degree to which disciplinary schemes create citizen-subjects in everyday life will determine how NGOs structure their activism in relation to the state in both countries. As the governmentality of the state intensifies its discursive moulding of citizen-subjects, the space and scope of these NGOs would shrink accordingly to accommodate these subject formations. In Singapore, where material stakeholding and ideological leadership has afforded the ruling party with an overwhelming penetration into the body-politic, an anaesthetized citizenship rid of political impulses has emerged - civil society is thus unsurprisingly blasé. In Malaysia, elite factionalism and affirmative ethnic policies have generated spaces of resistance towards the disciplining of citizen-subjects, constituting a wounded citizenship with residues of political inclination. The result is a greater proliferation of politicized identities and rights-based discourses in Malaysian civil society than Singapore.

4) Research interests

My current research interests include civil society and the discursive politics of democratization in Malaysia and Singapore; political sociology of post-colonial state formation; impact of transnationalism and globalization on Asian political space; multiculturalism and citizenship; new media and governance in Asia; critical theory.

5) Publications

(With Cherian George) “Calibrated Coercion and the history of Singapore’s Internet laws, 1996-2007”, Institute of Policy Studies (Singapore) Working Paper Series. (forthcoming 2008)
Review of Phua, Kai Lit. (ed) “Malaysia: Public Policy and Marginalised Groups.” Asian Journal of Social Science. (forthcoming 2008).
Review of Seow, Francis T. “Beyond Suspicion? The Singapore Judiciary.” Asian Journal of Social Science. (forthcoming 2008).
Technologies of Democracy – Discursive Shifts, Pastoral Power and Civil Society in Malaysia and Singapore. Master’s Thesis. Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore
Virtually Democratic – Weblog Journalism and the Public Sphere in Singapore. Honour’s Thesis. Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore (2006).

6) Modules taught in the department

SC1101E Making Sense of Society
SSA1201 Singapore Society
SC2214 Mass Media & Culture
SC3101 Social Thought and Social Theory
SC3219 Sexuality in Comparative Perspective

7) Related work experience

Teaching Assistant, Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, 2007-2008.

Research Assistant, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, 2006-2007.

(Correct as at 15 January 2008)