Research
I research language, race, and belonging in Singapore; a buried ghost town called Singapore in Michigan; global “Mother Tongue” politics; genres of local democracy in the U.S.; and the politics of Singaporean craft cocktail/spirits culture, among other things. Keep reading for more info on my research projects and recordings from my public talks.
You can also check out some of my writing and other research outputs here.
Research Interests
Linguistic anthropology / desire beyond sex & sexuality / critical discourse analysis / environmental anthropology & ecocriticism / linguistic & historical geography / global racial studies / image & visual studies / multilingualism / decolonial thinking & doing / colonial & postcolonial studies / transnational Asian studies & Global Asias / media studies / critical urban theory / critical perspectives on hybridity / critical theory / dismantling global white supremacy
Installation at the Singapore Discovery Centre on Singapore’s ongoing global city aspirations, ca. late 1990s / early 2000s
Current Research
Image and the Total Utopia: Desiring Distinction in Multiracial, Multilingual Singapore
This book examines how totalizing colonial images are used to confer a sense of coherence to the desire for belonging in diverse modern societies while simultaneously making belonging virtually impossible. In it, I track how language and race get linked as media and models for totalization, but I also show how desire always exceeds and undoes totalizing ambitions. I show how distinction becomes both an aspiration and impossibility, not despite, but because of narratives that assert anyone can belong in Singapore, a self-consciously “multi” society. I use online and offline ethnography, archival research, media analysis, and critical discourse analysis to track how state officials, branding experts, artists, and language professionals imagine and desire forms of language, race, culture, and national identity that they can claim as “uniquely Singaporean”—even as the category constantly fails on its own terms.
Between Two Singapores
On Western Michigan’s lakefront lies a buried town that survived for just under 40 years before it was swallowed by the dunes. Its name? Singapore. No one has lived there since 1875, when the town finally succumbed to the shifting sands, but residents of the small lakefront towns are still remembering, talking, writing about, and archiving fragments of this piece of local history—and fighting an ongoing legal battle to decide whether the land will become a public park or a luxury development. This story isn’t just about Michigan: On the other side of the world, in the Southeast Asian island city-state of Singapore that gave the short-lived Michigan town its name, people are also talking, writing, and creating art about the town.
Between Two Singapores uses environmental storytelling to understand the role imagination plays in shaping human connections to the natural world. More than the story of a single North American town buried in sand, the project will explore what it means to be human, to live as beings who are connected to the land not only through our physical encounters, wants, and needs, but also through our ability to desire and strive toward things that go beyond our immediate senses, reaching backward and forward in time to connect us to people, land, and stories a world away.
Digital collage prepared for my presentation of “Singapore, City of the Future” at the University of Chicago in September 2020 (digital collage by me). The presentation is now a published article.
Other Research + Collaborations
Beyond my book project and new research on the ghost town of Singapore, Michigan, I have several other ongoing projects as well as new works I’m actively developing in collaboration with other researchers, creators, and storytellers.
Doing Being Other in Global Singapore
The Southeast Asian island city-state of Singapore is known for being exceptionally multiracial, multilingual, multicultural, and multireligious, and many commentators insist that a Singaporean can look or sound like anything. However, in practice, this potentially boundless difference is regimented, simplified, and constrained in various ways. In this community-engaged, collaborative ethnography, we ask: what does it mean to be other in global Singapore—whether officially or otherwise? Participants share reflections from their research, creative and professional practice, activism, and advocacy focused on otherness—official and unofficial, both their own and/or others’.
The project kicked off with a roundtable in April 2023. Learn more here.
Spirit(s) of Singapore
This project explores the production and narration of Singapore’s cocktail culture and burgeoning craft spirits industries, and how “Singaporeanness” gets imagined as a quality inherent in alcoholic commodities produced in the island city-state. I hope to understand how ideas about cultural distinctiveness get distilled across sites of institutional and individual investment, and how values and qualities are made to connect across people, places, and material things.
Other Areas of Exploration
Manipulation as metaculture (with Cheng-Chai Chiang)
Decolonizing images (with Suzie Telep)
Identity imperialism (with Jay Ke-Schutte)
Urgent ethnography (with Yukun Zeng)
“Mother Tongue” as global politics (with Jessica Chandras)
U.S. school board politics (with Ilana Gershon)
Representations of Singapore in Western promotional media (with Kenzell Huggins)
Histories of Chicago Anthropology and the Chicago School of Sociology (with Pranathi Diwakar)