Adeline Koh
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 103753 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Adeline Koh |
| NOMBRES | Adeline |
| APELLIDO | Koh |
| FIRMA | KOH A |
| AFILIACIONES | Education University of Hong Kong |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9883-3227 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 48 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 203 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 47 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2003 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Studying ‘#Schoolfies’
This article examines how three elite schools in Singapore represented school life on Instagram during the COVID-19 pandemic, contributing to the broader literature on educational studies and sociology of education. While many schools globally shifted to online learning, schools in Singapore remained open throughout 2022, despite the widespread Omicron variant. The study analyzes Instagram content over 10 weeks in Term 1 of 2022, focusing on how …
Escaping China’s Gaokao with Chinese Capital
The gaokao, China’s annual college entrance exam, profoundly impacts Chinese students and their families; their singular performance will determine their university pathway. It is the exam of their lives. While studies often focus on rural, low-income, and middle-class experiences, little attention has been paid to how wealthy families circumvent the gaokao altogether. This study addresses that gap through a case study of ‘Lennus’, an elite schoo…
Intersectionality, interdisciplinarity and mental health in education
The youth mental health crisis and the subjectification of wellbeing in Singapore schools
10.1080/09518398.2023.2264247
Reining in the International
There is a growing literature studying the ‘non-traditional’ type of international schools. However, a less explored and under-theorised area is the changing dynamics of the global-local interactions in the way these international schools are being redefined and shaped by local processes, regimes of control, and mechanisms. Drawing on empirical evidence from sixteen ‘non-traditional’ international schools in urban China, our paper contributes to …
‘Start-up’ capital
The enrolment of Chinese middle-class children in elite international kindergartens is a big education industry in China. Our paper is situated in the broader sociology of elite schooling which has yet to fully explore how middle and upper middle-class parents are increasingly sending their children to elite international kindergartens. We present a case study from Shenzhen, China with a view to showing how the curriculum and the routine of its p…
Being “international” differently
International schools in China have enjoyed soaring popularity in recent years. Many of these schools adopt curricular forms and/or school brands originating from the US, UK or Canada, and they brand themselves as American-style (meishi), British-style (yingshi) and Sino-Canadian (zhongjia) international schools respectively. Beyond this general observation about the different types of international schools, there is little empirical research don…
Thank You to Reviewers
“New Engineering Education” in China
‘Cosmopolitan start-up’ capital
In this paper the authors study 19 Global Middle Class (GMC) families currently residing in four global cities: Hong Kong; London; Buenos Aires; and Tel Aviv. Through qualitative in-depth interviews, they sought to gather insights about GMC parenting strategies, specifically drawing attention to the decision-making processes of school choice. To facilitate their analysis, they draw on Bourdieu’s theory on types of capital and Ben-Porath’s notion …
Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities
In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes that by examining the process of history we can “discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others.” Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities examines the process of history in the narrative of the digital humanities and deconstructs its history as a straight line from the beginnings of humaniti…
Education and social mobility
Education and social mobility: possibilities, reproductive structures, discourse and materiality
Multiple theoretical and conceptual frameworks for understanding ‘international education’
Multiple theoretical and conceptual frameworks for understanding ‘international education’
Working Out the Salvation of Privilege in Elite Schools
This paper highlights how a small group of minority students worked to take advantage of the privileges available once they were admitted to an elite school. The argument proposed is that, unlike their more privileged peers, minority students who have made it through the gateways of elite schools have to work out a salvation of privilege to level up their chances and aspirations of success. A grounded theory based on ‘working out the salvation of…
Critiquing dominant cultures of schooling as a sustained critical enterprise in sociology of education
Critiquing dominant cultures of schooling as a sustained critical enterprise in sociology of education
Mobile Nationalism
This article examines whether and how globally mobile middle-class professional families engage in practices of nationalism through forging connections with a 'home nation' despite continuous relocations for work. Drawing on the concept of boundary objects which are used to facilitate frequent boundary crossings, we identify the promotion of language acquisition and cultural or national rituals and traditions as two central family practices that …
Travelling with and teaching critical literacy in Singapore, Australia, and Hong Kong
This article is a response to Allan Luke’s [(2018 Luke, A. (2018). Critical literacy, schooling, and social justice: The selected works of Allan Luke. New York: Routledge.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). Critical literacy, schooling, and social justice: The selected works of Allan Luke. New York, NY: Routledge] provocation to “join an international, intercultural and peer-conversation” about the imaginings and possibilities of “an education for cr…
The plurality of the Global Middle Class(es) and their school choices - moving the 'field' forward empirically and theoretically
The plurality of the Global Middle Class(es) and their school choices–moving the ‘field’ forward empirically and theoretically
Subterfuge hegemony
The implementation of moral and national education (MNE) in Hong Kong came to a stand-still when in 2012 anti-MNE student protests triumphantly saw it being shelved. Many perceived MNE as indoctrination and politically motivated by the leadership. Five years have gone by since the demise of the MNE. Ostensibly, the struggle for hegemonic control over the MNE curriculum is lost for the moment. However, this paper argues that the battle for control…
Class Choreographies
Awarded Best Book prize by CIES Globalization and Education SIG Awarded 2nd Prize in the Society of Educational Studies Annual Book Prize Elite schools have always been social choreographers par excel
Youth mobilities in elite schools
This paper presents the biographies of elite students and their purposeful mobilities. Their biographies are constructed from Skype interviews following their second year out of school. The focus of this paper is to trace the travel trajectories of a small set of students whose post school lives show what a reality check looks like outside the "social paradise" of their school. Situating the paper in the "new mobilities paradigm", the conceptual …
Women and the Politics of Representation in Southeast Asia
Introduction
21 Interface Adeline Koh Introduction: Re/Collecting In February 2012, Miriam Posner published a blog post that triggered a heated debate within the digital humanities community. In this post, “Some Things to Think About before You Exhort Everyone to Code,”1 Posner (2012a) rejected a dominant presupposition that to be a digital humanist, one has to be able to both read and write programming languages.2 Posner argued that this exhortation to code—…
Digitizing Chinese Englishmen
25 Interface Adeline Koh Digitizing Chinese Englishmen: Creating a Nineteenth-Century “Postcolonial Archive” One existing challenge to digital Asian and Asian American studies within the United States is the lack of specific funding for recovery efforts, specifically for digital work that concentrates on populations outside of North America. Of the 141 Digital Humanities Start-Up grants awarded by the National Endowment of the Humanities from 200…
Introduction to Interface 1
98 Interface Adeline Koh Introduction to Interface 1:1 the “digital humanities” has attracted increasing scholarly attention over the last decade. The rapid growth of this field has resulted in the construction of the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities; the publication of numerous volumes explaining the history, origin, and central debates of the digital humanities (Debates in the Digital Humanities, Definin…
The elite school as 'cognitive machine' and 'social paradise
In this article we draw on Bourdieu's The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power and his associated conceptual apparatus to examine Singapore as a 'field of power' and the formation of Singapore's 'state nobility' through an elite secondary school. We ask how well Bourdieu's conceptual apparatus travels, given Singapore's geo-political history and its strategic positioning with regard to what it calls its 'global hinterland'. We work…
Cultivating national leaders in an elite school
This paper explores the leadership cultivation practices of one elite school in Singapore. We point to the links between the habitus of the Singapore state and that of the school showing how different components of the school’s leadership curriculum deploy the transnational in order to produce leaders for the nation. In essence, we argue that the school is involved in a form of tactical globalisation which matches neatly that of the state itself.…
Doing class analysis in Singapore's elite education
This paper examines the specificity of the education–class nexus in an elite independent school in Singapore. It seeks to unravel the puzzle that meritocracy is dogmatically believed in Singapore in spite of evidences that point to the contrary. The paper draws on discursive (analysis of media materials) and institutional (analysis of interview conducted in Clarence High school) processes to mount the argument that doing class analysis in Singapo…
Global Flows of Foreign Talent
This paper draws on Appadurai's (1996) concept of ethnoscapes — the global flow of people or what has become increasingly popularized as the global flow of talent. Singapore has initiated a foreign talent policy to compete for a global pool of talent to make up for its shortfall of indigenous work-force. The rationale for recruiting foreign talent is informed by a nationalist competitive ideology to sustain Singapore in the new knowledge-based ec…
Sociological silhouettes of elite schooling
The elite school. What is it? Clearly this is not an un-subjective, universal or timeless category. Elite schools rise and fall, new types emerge and make status claims, older types stand firm or f
Living with Globalization Tactically
Singaporeans need not be told what globalization means. The popular media, as well as the political leaders of Singapore, have generated a local-babble of the derivative meanings of globalization. That globaliza- tion means competitiveness, innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, and foreign talent, has become deeply enculturated and embedded in the Singaporean consciousness. This paper will show that the local-babble on globalization in Singap…
The "magic" of tutorial centres in Hong Kong
Reining in the International
There is a growing literature studying the ‘non-traditional’ type of international schools. However, a less explored and under-theorised area is the changing dynamics of the global-local interactions in the way these international schools are being redefined and shaped by local processes, regimes of control, and mechanisms. Drawing on empirical evidence from sixteen ‘non-traditional’ international schools in urban China, our paper contributes to …
The plurality of the Global Middle Class(es) and their school choices - moving the 'field' forward empirically and theoretically
The plurality of the Global Middle Class(es) and their school choices–moving the ‘field’ forward empirically and theoretically
"Singapore Education in "New Times
This paper critically examines recent education reform in Singapore launched under the rhetoric of “Thinking Schools, Learning Nation” (TSLN). I will make explicit the context and the premises underlying the new state‐initiated TSLN education reform. I argue that the re‐alignment of education change is a response to the trajectories of (global) economic conditions, concomitantly framed by (local) sociopolitical and cultural–ideological needs. Nex…
Singapore's ‘global assemblage’
As a meta-concept, ‘globalization’ has the tendency to create master categories such as an emergent global/izing education policy. This paper critiques the thinking and assumptions that underpin a global education policy. The paper proposes that ‘global assemblage’ is a more helpful conceptual thinking about the way education policy works in globalizing circumstances. Conceptually, the notion of an assemblage helps us to re-conceive global forms …
Youth mobilities in elite schools
This paper presents the biographies of elite students and their purposeful mobilities. Their biographies are constructed from Skype interviews following their second year out of school. The focus of this paper is to trace the travel trajectories of a small set of students whose post school lives show what a reality check looks like outside the "social paradise" of their school. Situating the paper in the "new mobilities paradigm", the conceptual …
Education in the global city
It is purely a matter of (timely) coincidence that this special issue is published at the cusp of Singapore's golden jubilee. Fifty years of nation-building may not be considered long in historical
Mobile Nationalism
This article examines whether and how globally mobile middle-class professional families engage in practices of nationalism through forging connections with a 'home nation' despite continuous relocations for work. Drawing on the concept of boundary objects which are used to facilitate frequent boundary crossings, we identify the promotion of language acquisition and cultural or national rituals and traditions as two central family practices that …
Subterfuge hegemony
The implementation of moral and national education (MNE) in Hong Kong came to a stand-still when in 2012 anti-MNE student protests triumphantly saw it being shelved. Many perceived MNE as indoctrination and politically motivated by the leadership. Five years have gone by since the demise of the MNE. Ostensibly, the struggle for hegemonic control over the MNE curriculum is lost for the moment. However, this paper argues that the battle for control…
Niceness, Building, and Opening the Genealogy of the Digital Humanities
This essay explores the "social contract" of the digital humanities community. I argue that the social contract of the digital humanities is composed of two rules: 1) the notion of niceness or civility; and 2) the possession of technical knowledge, defined as knowledge of coding or computer programming. These rules are repeatedly raised within the public sphere of the digital humanities and are simultaneously contested and criticized. I claim tha…
The visualization of education policy
The attention to the visualization of education policy is an area of study yet to be developed and explored. This paper extends the scholarship of ‘media‐ted education policy production’ by developing a visual methodology to analyse a visual education policy document that takes the form of a documentary titled Learning Journeys (2000), which documented an uptake of and for the ‘Thinking Schools, Learning Nation’ policy in Singapore schools after …
Working against globalisation
This article discusses how the media and schools are used as disciplinary apparatuses to resist and work against globalisation in Singapore. Aihwa Ong calls the deployment of state ideological apparatuses, such as the media and schools, acts of 'reassemblage', when technocrats resort to assemble institutions, diverse Government practice and political values to engage in citizenship production. The National Education curriculum package introduced …
Inspecting the Nineteenth-century Literary Digital Archive
Intersectionality, interdisciplinarity and mental health in education
Tactics of Interventions
The youth mental health crisis and the subjectification of wellbeing in Singapore schools
10.1080/09518398.2023.2264247
Education and social mobility
Education and social mobility: possibilities, reproductive structures, discourse and materiality
Working Out the Salvation of Privilege in Elite Schools
This paper highlights how a small group of minority students worked to take advantage of the privileges available once they were admitted to an elite school. The argument proposed is that, unlike their more privileged peers, minority students who have made it through the gateways of elite schools have to work out a salvation of privilege to level up their chances and aspirations of success. A grounded theory based on ‘working out the salvation of…
In-between' Asia and Australia
This article mobilizes story-telling to narrate my lived experience of teaching English as a minority academic in one Australian university. Positioning myself as living ‘in-between’ two cultures and as an ‘Other’, I tell my story of how I have been ‘racialized’ and ‘Othered’ because I do not look White, and my spoken English is distinctly accented; hence, my legitimacy of teaching English is held suspect. My story contributes to the theorizing o…
Global Flows of Foreign Talent
This paper draws on Appadurai's (1996) concept of ethnoscapes — the global flow of people or what has become increasingly popularized as the global flow of talent. Singapore has initiated a foreign talent policy to compete for a global pool of talent to make up for its shortfall of indigenous work-force. The rationale for recruiting foreign talent is informed by a nationalist competitive ideology to sustain Singapore in the new knowledge-based ec…
"Singapore Education in "New Times
This paper critically examines recent education reform in Singapore launched under the rhetoric of “Thinking Schools, Learning Nation” (TSLN). I will make explicit the context and the premises underlying the new state‐initiated TSLN education reform. I argue that the re‐alignment of education change is a response to the trajectories of (global) economic conditions, concomitantly framed by (local) sociopolitical and cultural–ideological needs. Nex…
Heteroglossic’ Discourses on Globalization
In view of the broad scope of literature on globalization, this paper provides a synoptic reading of some of the globalization literatures, organized as ‘discourses’. The analysis of the discourses on globalization is confined to three overlapping discourses, namely, regional, ideological and economic discourses. Specific references and examples of local uptake of globalization will be drawn from Singapore and the wider Asia pacific region, as Be…
Working against globalisation
This article discusses how the media and schools are used as disciplinary apparatuses to resist and work against globalisation in Singapore. Aihwa Ong calls the deployment of state ideological apparatuses, such as the media and schools, acts of 'reassemblage', when technocrats resort to assemble institutions, diverse Government practice and political values to engage in citizenship production. The National Education curriculum package introduced …
Living with Globalization Tactically
Singaporeans need not be told what globalization means. The popular media, as well as the political leaders of Singapore, have generated a local-babble of the derivative meanings of globalization. That globaliza- tion means competitiveness, innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, and foreign talent, has become deeply enculturated and embedded in the Singaporean consciousness. This paper will show that the local-babble on globalization in Singap…
Deparochializing Education
Research on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has hitherto attracted scholarly attention and debate by both regional and international scholars working in area studies, such as international relations and Asia-Pacific/Southeast Asia studies. Confined to area studies, scholarly research on ASEAN is limiting because the parameters of research are invariably locked into issues related to economics, politics, security, and trade deve…
The visualization of education policy
The attention to the visualization of education policy is an area of study yet to be developed and explored. This paper extends the scholarship of ‘media‐ted education policy production’ by developing a visual methodology to analyse a visual education policy document that takes the form of a documentary titled Learning Journeys (2000), which documented an uptake of and for the ‘Thinking Schools, Learning Nation’ policy in Singapore schools after …
Comparative Racialisations
Since Chinua Achebe’s groundbreaking pronouncement that Conrad was ‘a bloody racist’ in 1979, scholars have taken Heart of Darkness as the definitive starting point for discussing Conrad and race. In contrast, this article argues that a geographically comparative approach challenges this critical paradigm, given that Conrad was Polish, French and British in his lifetime, as well as both a colonised subject and a coloniser. These numerous identity…
Singapore's ‘global assemblage’
As a meta-concept, ‘globalization’ has the tendency to create master categories such as an emergent global/izing education policy. This paper critiques the thinking and assumptions that underpin a global education policy. The paper proposes that ‘global assemblage’ is a more helpful conceptual thinking about the way education policy works in globalizing circumstances. Conceptually, the notion of an assemblage helps us to re-conceive global forms …
Cultivating national leaders in an elite school
This paper explores the leadership cultivation practices of one elite school in Singapore. We point to the links between the habitus of the Singapore state and that of the school showing how different components of the school’s leadership curriculum deploy the transnational in order to produce leaders for the nation. In essence, we argue that the school is involved in a form of tactical globalisation which matches neatly that of the state itself.…
Tactics of Interventions
In-between' Asia and Australia
This article mobilizes story-telling to narrate my lived experience of teaching English as a minority academic in one Australian university. Positioning myself as living ‘in-between’ two cultures and as an ‘Other’, I tell my story of how I have been ‘racialized’ and ‘Othered’ because I do not look White, and my spoken English is distinctly accented; hence, my legitimacy of teaching English is held suspect. My story contributes to the theorizing o…
The uses of racial melancholia in colonial education
This article investigates racial melancholia as a comparative literary device in Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823) and Hugh Clifford’s Saleh (1904). Racial melancholia refers to the process whereby racial self-knowledge becomes a site of psychological trauma for colonized subjects. In both novels, the European educations of Ourika, a West African girl, and Saleh, a Malay prince, lead to their development of racial melancholia and their eventual dea…
The Libidinal Economy of the Globalising Elite School Market
Elite schools are banks of emotion where the individuals and social classes that they serve deposit their desires and gain social dividends. They are also registers of social recognition and serve as spaces of collective capacity for their privileged clients. Elite schools have long been sites for the exercise of a form of affective agency by the wealthy and socially powerful. Many such people and groups have heavy emotional investments in the sc…
The Libidinal Economy of the Globalising Elite School Market
The elite school as 'cognitive machine' and 'social paradise
In this article we draw on Bourdieu's The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power and his associated conceptual apparatus to examine Singapore as a 'field of power' and the formation of Singapore's 'state nobility' through an elite secondary school. We ask how well Bourdieu's conceptual apparatus travels, given Singapore's geo-political history and its strategic positioning with regard to what it calls its 'global hinterland'. We work…
Malnutrition in older adults on financial assistance in an urban Asian country
Objective The objectives of the present study were to assess the nutritional status, identify factors for malnutrition risk and evaluate barriers to adequate nutrition among recipients of the Public Assistance (PA) scheme for socio-economically disadvantaged Singaporeans. Design Using a cross-sectional study design, we assessed PA recipients’ malnutrition risk using the DETERMINE Nutritional Health checklist and the full Mini-Nutritional Assessme…
Doing class analysis in Singapore's elite education
This paper examines the specificity of the education–class nexus in an elite independent school in Singapore. It seeks to unravel the puzzle that meritocracy is dogmatically believed in Singapore in spite of evidences that point to the contrary. The paper draws on discursive (analysis of media materials) and institutional (analysis of interview conducted in Clarence High school) processes to mount the argument that doing class analysis in Singapo…
Inspecting the Nineteenth-century Literary Digital Archive
The "magic" of tutorial centres in Hong Kong
Niceness, Building, and Opening the Genealogy of the Digital Humanities
This essay explores the "social contract" of the digital humanities community. I argue that the social contract of the digital humanities is composed of two rules: 1) the notion of niceness or civility; and 2) the possession of technical knowledge, defined as knowledge of coding or computer programming. These rules are repeatedly raised within the public sphere of the digital humanities and are simultaneously contested and criticized. I claim tha…
Education in the global city
It is purely a matter of (timely) coincidence that this special issue is published at the cusp of Singapore's golden jubilee. Fifty years of nation-building may not be considered long in historical
Women and the Politics of Representation in Southeast Asia
Introduction
21 Interface Adeline Koh Introduction: Re/Collecting In February 2012, Miriam Posner published a blog post that triggered a heated debate within the digital humanities community. In this post, “Some Things to Think About before You Exhort Everyone to Code,”1 Posner (2012a) rejected a dominant presupposition that to be a digital humanist, one has to be able to both read and write programming languages.2 Posner argued that this exhortation to code—…
Digitizing Chinese Englishmen
25 Interface Adeline Koh Digitizing Chinese Englishmen: Creating a Nineteenth-Century “Postcolonial Archive” One existing challenge to digital Asian and Asian American studies within the United States is the lack of specific funding for recovery efforts, specifically for digital work that concentrates on populations outside of North America. Of the 141 Digital Humanities Start-Up grants awarded by the National Endowment of the Humanities from 200…
Political science (36 obras) · Sociology (36 obras) · Law (24 obras) · Global Education and Multiculturalism (21 obras) · Politics (21 obras) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (18 obras) · Socioeconomic Development in Asia (18 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Social science (13 obras) · Elite (12 obras)