Citizenship In Singapore Research Articles

A ‘good’ neoliberal citizen: A policy analysis of conceptions of young Singaporean citizens

Globalisation has driven the pursuit of more active citizenship forms. Many governments see educational policies as critical to preparing young citizens with the necessary skills, knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours to thrive in a changing global context. However, what active citizenship education is and means varies across countries. Little is known about how active citizenship is conceptualised in educational policies in Singapore and the kinds of citizens these policies and programmes aim to nurture. This article draws on an analysis of 20 Singapore policy texts, such as political speeches, press releases, and curriculum documents, to examine the kind of Singaporean citizens the Singapore government seeks to nurture. We argue that globalisation provides a critical context for local conceptualisations of citizenship, but the active Singapore citizen is not an individualistic nor a universal neoliberal citizen subject. In line with Asian conceptions of citizenship, which posit that ‘good’ people make good citizens, active citizenship in Singapore has a prevailing focus on ‘good’ character and an active citizen who prioritises the well-being of the collective, yet caught in a paradoxical pursuit of a neoliberal citizen.

The discursive construction of new citizen identities in Singapore

AbstractThis article investigates how new citizens reconfigure dominant indexes of citizenship to claim status as legitimate new citizens of Singapore. New citizens are expected to resolve a tension that underpins public discourses in Singapore society: while the statal narrative of multiculturalism countenances new citizens to have perceivable markers of difference, everyday discourses expect new citizens to assimilate into the ‘Singapore core’—a term used in Singapore that denotes a homogeneous understanding of what it means to be Singaporean. By adopting a metapragmatic approach, this article identifies three common indexes of citizenship that new citizens negotiate to resolve this contradiction: language, loyalty, and legacy. By reconfiguring common markers of citizenship in Singapore, new citizens are able to discursively construct a type of citizenship that they can legitimately claim and contribute to. This expands common understandings of the notion of citizenship in Singapore society. (Citizenship, language ideologies, multiculturalism, metapragmatics, Singapore)*

Transnational marriage migration and the negotiation of precarious pathways beyond partial citizenship in Singapore

ABSTRACT While mixed marriage can act as a ‘facilitator of integration’ for migrants, feminist scholars have argued that in Asia, pathways to citizenship for marriage migrants are precariously ridden with negotiations around gender, ethnicity, nationality and class. In this context, the family sphere lies between the individual migrant and the state, and features as a strategic site where citizenship categories take effect on migrant lives on the one hand, and where citizenship claims are mediated, negotiated and contested on the other. Drawing on two ethnographic studies of Southeast Asian women marrying Singaporean men belonging to lower socioeconomic strata, we show how the host nation-state’s hierarchical control interacts with family processes in producing marriage migrants as partial citizens with limited rights to work, residency and citizenship. We also demonstrate how marriage migrants find leverage in negotiating the paradox of being responsible affinal subjects of the family and partial citizens of the nation-state.

Embracing the nation: Strategic deployment of sexuality, nation, and citizenship in Singapore.

How do sexual minorities navigate and negotiate with nationalism? While some scholars consider nationalism as a primarily exclusionary force against sexual minorities, how might we understand sexual minorities' engagement with nationalism? I address these questions by exploring the strategic deployment of sexual and national identities of LGBT movements through the case study of Singapore's annual LGBT-inclusive event, Pink Dot. In response to the authoritarian and heteronormative state's construction of sexual minorities as non-national Others, Pink Dot mobilizes both sexual and national identities in an effort to forge a space of inclusion while ensuring its survival. By portraying itself as a uniquely Singaporean event and espousing national identity and belonging through symbolic and performative practices, Pink Dot leverages national identity to minimize differences from and foreground similarities to the majority. In this way, sexual minorities in Singapore endeavor to embed themselves within the narratives of the nation and claim their legitimate belonging while simultaneously projecting a nation more inclusive of sexual difference. The aspirational inclusion of sexual minorities in the national imagery, however, inevitably elicits the state's backlash that narrowly defines the physical and symbolic boundaries of the political project. This analysis advances our understanding of the interactions between the state and social movements in shaping the relationship among the nation, sexuality, and citizenship.

The myth of migrant transience: racializing new Chinese migrants in mobile Singapore

ABSTRACT This paper highlights the politics of mobility through investigating Singaporean-Chinese imaginaries of mobility which are tied to the racialization of mainland Chinese migrants in Singapore. Host societies imbue (im)mobility with meanings; in the case of Singapore, mobility is imagined as transience and even immorality. The myth of migrants’ transience, both in time and in space, posits them as simultaneously marginal and threatening, and is pertinent in the case of Singapore where 29% of the population is recorded as transient labour. As a state whose population growth owes more to immigration than natural increase, Singapore must maintain its mobile labour to fulfill its aspirations to keep moving forward as a mobile city. Its high-wage mobile labour also provides a pool from which Singapore sources its potential citizens, to make up for low birth-rates and to maintain an ethnic Chinese dominance in the state. As such, a substantial number of migrants including the mainland Chinese have attained permanent residence or citizenship in Singapore, to the discontent of its Singaporean-Chinese majority. Imagined as embodiments of mobility and of a lesser Chineseness, Chinese migrants are racialized as more transient than other groups of migrants and made ‘stranger than other others.’

Ashen History: Narrating the Fire at the Origin of Modern Singapore

AbstractOral histories of former squatters trace the origins of modern Singapore to its largest and historically most important fire at Bukit Ho Swee on 25 May 1961. The inferno not only razed an urban kampong, it also set the stage for the government to transform Singapore into an organized public housing state of governable citizen‐workers. The storytellers’ ashen histories highlight the grey area colored by the memory of the inferno; they straddle national and local history, and reveal the price of citizenship in Singapore. The narratives of the kampong tell us much about people’s mobility, community, and modernity—they were far from inert, as the state depicted them. Where the state was transfixed on high modernism in the form of organized public housing blocks, the squatters were willing to accept different typologies of housing and ways of life. Their narratives of, and alternatively silence on, possible arson outline the social worlds of the squatters in the past but also underline the ambivalent position of socialized citizens today, straddling and mediating between their own narratives and that of the state.

MySkillsFuture for Students, STEM Learning, and the Design of Neoliberal Citizenship in Singapore

There is a great need for interrogating the politics of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning at a global level and for STEM literacies that include robust sociopolitical analysis. This article analyzes neoliberal underpinnings of STEM discourse on an online portal created for pedagogic use with primary and secondary students in Singapore. We find that the portal leverages student interests, self-discovery, and diverse identities to recruit them into (neoliberal) figured worlds of learning, work, and citizenship that narrowly imagine a disciplined society and workforce appealing to global capital. Excluded and rendered invisible are skills to address pressing global issues (e.g., inequality, poverty, or sustainability) or to understand the world, others, or power relations, except strategically as instrumental skills that support industries and economic growth. We conclude by offering a hopeful vision that builds on the diversity, hybridity, and cultural crossroads of Singapore, asserting that alternate speculative futures are possible, including for decolonized or desettled STEM perspectives.

Masculinizing national service: the cultural reproduction of masculinities and militarization of male citizenship in Singapore

ABSTRACTAs a conscription-based military, the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) fulfils an important role in transforming Singaporean boys from various classes and ethnic backgrounds into adult men. At a time when there is interest in the production and performativity of military masculinities in countries that have abandoned conscription, this article examines how, as a rite of passage into manhood, compulsory enlistment in the SAF reproduces hegemonic masculinities denoting ruggedness, perseverance, leadership, muscular manliness and self-discipline. Whilst the SAF can be represented as a site for hegemonic masculinities in the authoritarian Southeast Asian city-state, this work articulates a framework for theorizing how military masculinities are responsible for gendering male citizenship in Singapore. It also suggests that military masculinities can be conceptualized as cultural capital that allows Singaporean males to construct masculinity and assert a male identity in various social settings whilst gaining access to elite networks of power.

“Neighbours First, Bankers Second”: Mobilising financial citizenship in Singapore

While financialisation has been typically framed as a market imperative that permeates everyday life and transforms individuals and households into responsible self-governing subjects, we argue that the role of the state is vital in explaining the formation and impacts of specific forms of financial subjectivity. In particular, the state is an active agent in the production of financial citizenship through championing particular financial responsibilities and duties. As such, individual consumers are financial subjects who not only fulfil neoliberalised scripts of self-reliant and disciplined subjects able to take care of their own financial futures, they are also mobilised as citizen subjects who contribute to a stronger and more competitive national economy through their changing financial practices, even as they benefit from greater access to financial products and services. Drawing from the role of the Singapore government and the institutional development of the Post Office Savings Bank (POSB), we connect state, firm and individuals in the changing roles of financial logics in everyday life, corporate transformation, and how those feed into broader developmental objectives of Singapore’s international financial centre aspiration. This supports a more supple analysis of Foucauldian governmentality by drawing out the ways in which heterogeneous elements of power—sovereign, disciplinary and biopolitical—are reconfigured and redeployed in new formations of financial subjects.

Crafted assemblage: young women’s ‘lifestyle’ blogs, consumerism and citizenship in Singapore

Blogs categorised in the genres of fashion and lifestyle are often overlooked in discussions of blogging, politics and citizenship. This article examines lifestyle blogs with rich media content, authored by young Singaporean women. It argues through a content analysis and an analysis of the blogs’ aesthetic as assemblage that there is a significant relationship between women’s consumerism in Singapore and expressions of citizenship. These blogs have a crafted aesthetic that is both parochial (e.g. through their appeal to regional popular culture) and global (e.g. through their focus on particular globally circulated consumer products). As material-supporting inquiry, they also provide a means of examining these young women’s views on privacy and consumption, as well as their aspirations. The article concludes by suggesting that to effectively capitalise on such blogs as a means of understanding social life and ‘everyday politics’, we need to appreciate them not only as being culturally embedded but also as having a particular cultural aesthetic that is created by how bloggers craft and assemble their identities and narratives online.

Constructions of cosmopolitanism in teenage citizenship in Singapore

This study aims to uncover the geographies of places informing teenagers' understanding of cosmopolitanism and citizenship. Children and young people (CYP) in Singapore are becoming more internationally mobile and growing up in highly globalised Singapore. There are three overall arguments in this paper. First, the local is the actual place to situate studies on cosmopolitanism and that cosmopolitanism should be considered as a dimension of deterritorialised citizenship amongst CYP growing up in highly globalised nation-states. There are ‘roots and routes’ approaches to citizenship and my second argument is that the ‘routes approach’ to citizenship has ingrained cosmopolitan experiences into young people's life-worlds and is arguably the stronger approach of the two for young Singaporeans. Finally, this study demonstrates that the experiences of CYP in geographies of education [Holloway, S. L., P. Hubbard, H. Jöns, H. Pimlott-Wilson. 2010. “Geographies of Education and the Significance of Children, Youth and Families.” Progress in Human Geography 34 (5)] are credible yet neglected life-worlds that can help reconstitute frameworks for understanding cosmopolitanism and citizenship [Harvey, D. 2000. “Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils.” Public Culture 12 (2)].

Immigration, society and modalities of citizenship in Singapore

In this article, I argue that three modalities of citizenship are at play in Singapore: liberal, communal and social. Using a grounded theoretical approach, I highlight the instances in which these modes of conceptualizing citizenship appear in discourse, practice and policy. While past scholarship has highlighted the contrast between liberal and communal modes of citizenship, the social mode has been largely subsumed and obscured within the rubric of communal (or communitarian) democracy and ethno-nationalist citizenship. The article analyzes the interplay among these three modes of citizenship as they played out in the discourse surrounding the 2011 General Election in Singapore. The tension between citizens and noncitizens has become a central political issue in Singapore. Less recognized, but highlighted in my analysis, liberal and communal senses of citizenship are in tension not only with each other but also with a notion of the social based on relationships of mutual benefit and obligation rather than communal, categorical belonging. Drawing on Robert Esposito's critique of modern ideas of community and (re)theorization of communitas, I argue that in the case of Singapore and elsewhere, reintroducing a notion of the social (as distinct from the communal) holds potential for discourses, practices and policies that can transcend the divisiveness associated with communalism and the socioeconomic inequalities associated with liberalism.

Higher education and entrepreneurial citizenship in Singapore

Focusing on Singapore's 'Global Schoolhouse' project, this article discusses how efforts to transform Singapore into a 'world class' knowledge economy entail changes to the status of citizenship in Singapore. The project of wooing top foreign universities to Singapore is permeated with an entrepreneurial ideal of Singapore as the 'Boston of the East'. Since Singaporeans tend to be viewed by the Singapore government as particularly risk averse compared to Westerners and other Asians, the government has increasingly relied on 'foreign talent' to provide entrepreneurial dynamism to Singapore. The expansion of high-quality university education in Singapore serves as a vehicle of this 'foreign talent' policy as much as it accommodates the needs of local students for higher education. The ensuing questions about citizenship in Singapore's knowledge economy are finally discussed in terms of a differentiated 'entrepreneurial citizenship'.

A Tentative Research on Education of Sense of Identity of Citizenship in Singapore

Sense of identity among citizens is an issue that is generally concerned and tried to resolve by all countries all over the world nowadays. A general view of the development history of Singapore, it is discovered that economic boom and harmony of the society in Singapore benefits from cultivation of the sense of identity of citizenship. The reform and opening up of China for almost thirty years has brought tremendous social changes, and simultaneously has led to crisis in identity of citizenship. Successful practices and experiences in Singapore to intensify the core of “awareness of the nation” and conduct education of sense of identity among citizens have important guidance value and reference significance to establishment of a harmonious society in China.

“Don't Worry, I'm Not Going to Report You”: Education for Citizenship in Singapore

This case study examined how Singapore adolescents from different socio-economic, academic, and racial backgrounds positioned themselves as citizens within a highly-regulated, centralized educational context. Through interviews, classroom observations, and the author investigated students' conceptions of citizenship and their perspectives of the official historical national narrative. Despite their different backgrounds, participants from all three schools consistently provided very similar depictions of citizenship and key events in Singapore's history. This shared understanding can partially be attributed to the inclusive nature of the national narrative in the school curriculum, which consistently emphasizes the themes of unity, consensus, and harmony. At the same time, the participants consciously avoided addressing controversial issues and none contested the central narrative of racial harmony, meritocracy, and progress, largely due to the combination of a climate of censorship and a regime of high stakes tests that stifle democratic discourse within the classroom.

Patriotism and the Limits of Globalization: Renegotiating Citizenship in Singapore

Singapore, as one of the world's most globalized nations, has undergone a series of tumultuous political and economic crises that has forced the nation's leaders to adopt a very proactive stance to the formation of national identity. To create an imagined nation that would secure economic growth and harmonious ethnic ties, the leaders of the nation chose to define Singapore as a global city, which has had a long-term effect of lessening citizen loyalty to the Republic as the effects of globalization are realized. This article examines the role of globalization in forming and weakening national identity, and hence patriotism in Singapore, and explores the ways in which civic discourse is employed by the citizens and governmental leaders of Singapore to renegotiate national identity and patriotism.

Think Centre: The Internet and Politics in the New Economy

This paper provides a personal account of the attempt to expand the scope and effectiveness of civil society in Singapore through the creative deployment of the Internet and other communication technologies. The narrative seeks to convey the experience of the attempt to open up the possibilities of informed, active and engaged citizenship in Singapore and beyond. Both the possibilities and possible bottlenecks are examined in the context of globalization and the emergence of new communication technologies and globalization.

National Education and ‘Active Citizenship’: Implications for Citizenship and Citizenship Education in Singapore

Citizenship and values education in one form or other has existed in Singapore since it acquired self‐government in 1959. Much has been written about the different forms that this education has taken over the years. In recent years, there have been efforts at describing and analyzing aspects of National Education, which was introduced in 1997. At the same time, a number of books and papers have been written examining the concept of citizenship in Singapore, which cover the period between the late 1980s to the mid 1990s. In the last five years leading to the millennium, there have been two major sets of changes in Singapore that have had implications for the conception of citizenship and for citizenship education. The first is to do with the introduction of National Education; the second, with the notion of active citizenship. This article describes these recent changes, and discuss their implications for the concept of citizenship and for citizenship education in Singapore.

The Politics of Nation Building and Citizenship in Singapore. By Michael Hill and Lian Kwen Fee. London: Routledge, 1995, x, 285 pp. $14.99 (paper).

The Politics of Nation Building and Citizenship in Singapore. By Michael Hill and Lian Kwen Fee. London: Routledge, 1995, x, 285 pp. $14.99 (paper).

Book Reviews: BENG-HUAT CHUA, Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore. London: Routledge, 1995, 237pp. MICHAEL HILL AND LIAN KWEN FEE, The Politics of Nation Building and Citizenship in Singapore. London: Routledge, 1995, 285pp

Book Reviews: BENG-HUAT CHUA, Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore. London: Routledge, 1995, 237pp. MICHAEL HILL AND LIAN KWEN FEE, The Politics of Nation Building and Citizenship in Singapore. London: Routledge, 1995, 285pp