Research

My primary research is about the politics of language, race, and belonging in Singapore. I’m also researching “Mother Tongue” politics; intersectional othering; state knowledge-production; Singaporean craft cocktail/spirits culture; and U.S. school boards, among other things. Keep reading to learn more about my interests, as well as my current and upcoming research.

You can also check out some of my writing and research outputs here.

Research Interests

 

Linguistic anthropology / critical discourse analysis / global racial studies / visual studies / multilingualism / decolonial thinking + doing / colonial + postcolonial studies / transnational Asian studies + Global Asias / media studies / critical urban theory / critical perspectives on hybridity / dismantling global white supremacy

Installation at the Singapore Discovery Centre on Singapore’s ongoing global city aspirations, ca. late 1990s / early 2000s

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: Scaling Raciolinguistic Belonging in Singapore

My primary research project examines how race, language, and belonging get (un)made in Singapore. I pursue this across sites and scales: from state-led commemorations, place-branding practice, urban placemaking, and artistic/cultural production to everyday debates about belonging. This (un)making doesn’t happen in a vacuum: rather than focusing on Singapore in isolation, my work tracks the contradictions, tensions, and pressures due to Singapore’s uneasy and changing place in the world today. I use on- and offline ethnography, archival research, media, and discourse analysis to track how local–global divides get navigated contextually by state officials, branding experts, artists, and language professionals.

This research was supported in part by the Fulbright U.S. Student Researcher Program and the Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund of the Reed Foundation, with additional support from the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, UChicago Urban, and the Lichtstern Fund of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

 

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 considers the production and narration of Singapore’s cocktail culture and burgeoning craft spirits industries, and the many ways that Singaporeanness becomes a quality attributed to alcoholic commodities. 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.

 
Promotional cover image prepared for my presentation of “Singapore, City of the Future” at the University of Chicago in September 2020 (digital collage by me)

Promotional cover image prepared for my presentation of “Singapore, City of the Future” at the University of Chicago in September 2020 (digital collage by me)

Other Research + Collaborations

 

Beyond my primary and new, ongoing research, I’ve researched/written on other topics:

  • 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 and failures of political communication (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)

  • Fieldwork methods and methodology (with Robert Gelles)

  • Gerrymandering and cartographic technologies (with Robert Gelles)

I’m also writing critically/autobiographically about disavowals of white-passing privilege among Americans who identify as mixed-race.