RESEARCH
I am a political sociologist and ethnographer by training.
My research sits at the intersections of urban politics, governance, and community developments in facilitating authoritarian or democratic forms of urban regimes and contemporary forms of everyday politics in making city life possible for all who dwell in it. I am also keen to discover how the interactions of cities, capital, and communities (3Cs) create and mediate new forms of urban encounters and pursuits. My research is supported by my work as an urban community organizer in transforming urban praxis to facilitate new possibilities in the places I serve and lead.
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Outside of my urban research, I also examine Asian animation (anime) as pop cultural boundary objects that connect and collide social worlds as they offer us crucial insights into our contemporary lives as mediated selves. With anime as method, I interrogate the contours of our (dis)enchantments with neoliberal capitalism, sinofuturism, and the culture industries.
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I am open to collaboration and research opportunities. Drop me an email at: georgewong@smu.edu.sg
Current Research Agendas
State-sponsored Grassroots Organisations and Urban Community Development
Using Singapore as a critical case, I examine the inner-workings and actors involved in state-sponsored grassroots organisations and initiatives within urban regimes with strong local/national state influences, I interrogate how community development reproduces political legitimacy, consent or control over urban neighbourhoods and local communities.
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State-sponsored grassroots organisations in Singapore
Urban Eco-politics
Who defines, negotiate and pursue the ecological futures of our cities and societies? In what ways do urban eco-politics and governance reconfigure pre-existing urban regimes as climate change and sustainability become de-facto discourses in urban political conversations? How do such arrangements direct urban projects that present themselves as speculative or transformative heterotopias of tomorrow?
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In this project, I examine the various ways urban-eco politics is understood and unraveled as new and existing urban actors take center stage in using the city as both the sites and solutions to our ecological urbanisms. In particular, I am keenly interested in how community powers are reconstituted or reaffirmed new roles or subjectivities in urban projects such as "eco-cities" or "sustainable cities".
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Speculative urban eco-politics and Forest City, Iskandar Johor
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Urban crittizenship and biophilic urbanism
The Gifted City: Philanthropy, Urban Governance and Agents of Development
How do private concessional capitals influence urban and social developments through trisector grantmaking, collaborations, and investments? How do local communities and non-profit organisations respond to such capital flows and what are their implications to contemporary trajectories of social developments and the social sector? More broadly speaking, how do cities, in a bid to become philanthropic hubs, become sites and vehicles where philanthropic capital, along with their owners and their instruments, becomes a defining class that transform the face of the social sector and urban community development?
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In this project, I explore the inner workings of contemporary philanthropic ecosystems and the social worlds, and ask how and why agents of developments within build new urban coalitions to influence, integrate and inform new/existing relations of strategic giving and grantmaking in the nonprofit worlds and beyond.
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Philanthropic hubs
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Family offices and philanthropy
Isekais: Beyond the Escapist Trope
The isekai (different world) genre has exploded in the last decade, leading to massive (re)production and consumption across various platforms. Contemporary accounts point to conventional notions of escapism and fantasy distraction as ways to explain its popularity, confining the genre to its plot meta-structures.
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In this project, I re-examine the genre beyond its escapist trope by interrogating the relations of cultural production and consumption. Taking isekais not just as a subgenre, but as method, I ask how it informs audiences' mediated selves as they prosume isekais in ways that inform the social worlds they are embedded within.
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Karoshi Isekais: Reconstituting the Salaryman as Tragedy
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Slice of (Another) Life: Alter-immersive vicarious consumption of mundaneneness
Publications
Lion City Zoopolis: Urban Crittizenship in Biophilic Singapore (2024)
Wong, G.
Anthrozoös
A central theme of Singapore’s “City in Nature” vision is framed through biophilic urbanism, or efforts to harmonize biodiversity and urban development through built, social, and political design. This paper detours from conventions of Singapore’s urban ecological futures and instead explores the governance of fauna co-existence in the city–state through the concept of “urban crittizenship.”
In doing so, I present urban crittizenship as an inductive model of analyzing urban wildlife coexistence as primarily secured through infrastructural and political regime configurations that inform their crittizenship statuses. I further iterate that using an urban crittizenship framework refines our understanding and application of biophilic urbanism as socio-political processes that influence already-existing urban wildlife coexistence, complementing existing analyses in urban ecology. In other words, there is a politics of biophilia that warrants a conversation, because biophilia is political.
Ten Years as Boundary Object: The Search for Identity and Belonging as ‘Hongkongers’ (2023)
Lowe, J., Espena, D., & Wong, G. (co-auths)
Asian Studies Review
This article examines the complex process of symbolic boundary-making of ‘Hongkonger’ cultural identities through the lens of the controversial 2015 film Ten Years, which is a celebrated omnibus production comprised of five short segments that picture a dystopic end to Hong Kong’s cherished way of life in the year 2025. The article is premised on an interdisciplinary approach engaging with cultural studies and film studies. On one hand, it explores how Ten Years functioned as a boundary object, a vast terrain within which cultural identities of what it means to be a Hongkonger are constructed, banished, imagined, and performed under the rubric of bodily performatives. On the other hand, it offers blurring encounters into unfamiliar and precarious territories where the formation and formulation of Hongkonger identities and sense of belonging are negotiated, evacuated, and inhabited. In the end, the key tropes in Ten Years suggest that boundary work in post-Umbrella Hong Kong affectively negotiates with state-level nationalism advocated by the central government in Beijing through establishing and reformulating notions of ‘localism’ and Hongkonger identities.
Integration Taxes and Gestural Integration: Access and Limits to Integration Through New Citizens’ Participation in State-Sponsored Grassroots Volunteerism in Singapore (2023)
Wong, G.
Journal of Intercultural Studies
Integration is a contested topic in Singapore’s public discourse. One such area is integration through state-sponsored grassroots community volunteerism. Little is however known about such experiences of grassroots volunteerism to integration outcomes. This paper addresses the gap by exploring how new citizen and permanent resident grassroots volunteers make sense of their experiences through ‘integration taxes' and ‘gestural integration'. In doing so, this paper argues that while grassroots volunteerism offers lower barriers to entry for new citizens, it constraints the diversity of integration by and through new citizen volunteers due to discrimination, marginalisation and staged integration faced in grassroots work.
Governing the Global City's Mandarinate:
Politically Motivated Appointments in
Singapore's Public Sector (2023)
Wong, G. & Mussagulova, A. (co-auth)
in Peters, B., Knox, C., & Kim, B. (Eds.). (2023). Political Patronage in Asian Bureaucracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Singapore’s civil service has been lauded as one of the successful examples in the world. The emphasis on meritocracy, or recruiting the best and brightest, has been the hallmark of Singapore’s governance, which has seen it topping governance effectiveness rankings. This principle remains a guiding philosophy for the dominant People’s Action Party (PAP) which has governed Singapore since 1959. Political analysts often attributed “the Singapore miracle” to its corruption-free, highly professional, technocratic government which has Singaporeans’ best interests at heart.
Legitimising Viewing Publics through Nostalgia:The Mediated Tropicality of Singapore's 'Kampung Spirit' (2022)
Wong, G. & Lowe, J. (co-auth)
Chinese Journal of Communication
Using two recent films—Long Long Time Ago and Diam Diam Era—this article analyses how Jack Neo communicates a sanitized nostalgia for the “kampong spirit” through his films, which calibrates willing acceptance of the Singapore government’s authoritarian rule. In supporting the state’s presentist historiography, the films of Jack Neo induce a depoliticization of unpleasant memories arising from the ruling party’s unpopular housing and language policies of the past. The nostalgia mediated in both films is aligned towards an imaginary geography and mental map of a First World nation, which exhorts Singaporeans to disavow “the tropics” by nostalgizing the state’s modernization efforts. The cumulative thrust of an evidence-free and presentist nostalgia ostensible in both films, this work argues, satisfies the paternalistic state’s obsession with the public legitimation of its ruling mandate.
Grassroots Volunteerism in Singapore:
A Survey of the Literature (2019)
Wong, G.
in Jun Jie Woo's (ed) Educating for Empathy: Service Learning in Public Policy Education. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing.
Local political participation is a ubiquitous element of any contemporary political life today and different regimes offer a diversity of expressions, forms of organisation and intensity of involvement. As a procedural democracy with a colonial legacy and under a dominant party regime for almost 60 years, the development of Singapore‘s local political participation offers narratives of political transition, consolidation and nation building which have been both praised and castigated by scholars, statesmen and citizens. One of the few consensuses in the existing debates surrounding Singapore‘s political legacies however lies in the immense significance of grassroots volunteerism to local politics and political participation. The narrative of grassroots volunteerism in Singapore is both inseparable and indispensable from the narrative of its nation building and political consolidation. In this book chapter, I explore how grassroots volunteerism has been studied in the context of Singapore's grassroots sector.
Singapore in 2018:
Between Uncharted Waters
and Old Ghosts (2019)
Wong, G. & Woo J.J (co-auth)
in Malcolm Cook & Daljit Singh's (eds) Southeast Asian Affairs 2019.
Singapore: ISEAS Press.
For the city state of Singapore, 2018 was a year of many firsts. It marked the midpoint of the 13th Parliament of Singapore within a manifestly post–Lee Kuan Yew era. The incumbent government of the People's Action Party (PAP) began the year with the pleasant surprise that economic growth in 2017 had reached 3.6 per cent. This exceeded the modest expectations of 1.5 to 3.5 per cent. But despite the positive start, 2018 was to be filled with headwinds for Singapore, both new and familiar. Top of the list was the revival of tensions with Malaysia, as well as a newly elected PAP Central Executive Committee, marking a crucial occasion of fourth-generation leadership transition for the world's third-longest ruling political party. On the international front it was the year of summits, with Singapore hosting two major events: the North Korea–United States Summit — the “Trump-Kim summit” — and the 33rd ASEAN Summit, both amidst the trade war between China and the United States. Meanwhile, in local politics, other notable firsts included the formation of the Select Committee on deliberate online falsehoods and the convening of its public hearings, as well as a cyberattack on SingHealth, Singapore's largest healthcare provider, resulting in the records of about 1.5 million patients being compromised. On the ground, inequality took the crown as buzzword of the year in the public consciousness as Singapore grappled with various encounters, propelling the otherwise academic term into the limelight. On the policy side, the introduction of the Merdeka Generation Package set a new bar for the government's commitment to reducing the healthcare costs of elderly Singaporeans.
Marginalized Migrants and Urbanization
in Southeast Asia
Wong, G. & Kathiravelu L. (co-auth)
in Rita Padawangi's (ed) Routledge Handbook of Urbanization in Southeast Asia. Routledge.
Asia is now the region with the largest movements of migrants in the world. International migration within Asia accounts for a significant proportion of those mobilities, with Southeast Asia a highly popular destination region. Within this zone, Thailand, Brunei and Malaysia receive the highest levels of migrants. The city-state of Singapore, however, tops the list, with the highest total population of international migrant arrivals, and about 53 per cent of its foreign resident population coming from other parts of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) region. Most migrants who move transnationally migrate to engage in low waged dirty, dangerous and undesirable work that many locals will not do. This often places them in marginalized positions, not just in relation to the jobs that they carry out but the structural conditions under which they labor, as state policies often treat them as “needed but not wanted”. In this book chapter, we uncover the different ways in which low-wage migrant workers in Singapore are marginalized as part of Singapore's urbanization and urbanism trends. In doing so, we project these practices, along with the policies and ideologies behind them as part of larger migration regime trends in Southeast Asia.
Voices behind the veil: Unraveling the
hijab debate in Singapore through the
lived experiences of hijab-wearing
Malay-Muslim women
Wong, G. & Humairah, B. Z. (co-auth)
South East Asia Research
This article critically examines the hijab debate in Singapore by drawing upon the lived experiences of Singaporean Malay-Muslim women whose daily lives are fraught with a constant negotiation between their identities as veiled women and the institutionalized constraints that impede their social mobility and voices in the public arena. Drawing upon publicly accessible data and findings from in-depth interviews with Malay-Muslim nurses, the article explores the everyday lived struggles of women working in Singapore’s public healthcare sector organizations. These struggles illustrate a decade-old public debate on the hijab. We show how these women’s narratives reflect their intersectional subjectivities, which unravel dominant state discourses on multiracialism that claim the incompatibility of the hijab with secularism. We argue that a re-positioning of the existing debate beyond its dominant association with race is crucial in overcoming the political inertia that continues to plague the hijab issue in Singapore.