D P S Goh
Biographic Data
| ID | 11424 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D P S Goh |
| GIVEN NAMES | D P S |
| FAMILY NAME | Goh |
| SIGNATURE | GOH D P S |
| AFFILIATIONS | National University of Singapore |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7298-4182 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 272 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Gendered dynamics and emotional well-being in the “aftermath” of the pandemic
Ecotopian imaginations, urban densities and the dispersal of affect in new cities in Southeast Asia
Overcrowding, congestion and environmental degradation are often the reasons cited for the building of new administrative and business cities to locations away from existing metropolitan centers. In Asia, the planning of right urban densities has become the dominant paradigm for designing these new cities and selling these cities to investors and citizens. Following the wave of building eco-cities in Asia, framing and dressing this paradigm is th…
Conservative Christianity, Anti-Vaccination Activism, and the Challenge to Secularism in Singapore
A culture war has been brewing in Singapore since 2009 when a conservative Christian group conducted a reverse takeover of a feminist civil society organization and was subsequently expelled from the organization in a publicized meeting between the two groups. Since then, the state has mediated the contestation of values between religious conservatives and liberal groups allied around issues of gender and sexuality. The culture war between the tw…
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
Beyond technocratic statecraft
The bowing out of the designated successor to the leadership of the long-ruling People’s Action Party, Heng Swee Keat, and thus the prime ministership of Singapore in April 2021 led to a sense of political crisis in the illiberal state. This article argues that this troubled third leadership transition was preceded and conditioned by the similarly troubled protracted first leadership transition in the 1980s and 1990s. The technocratic statecraft …
Migrant worker recreational centres, accidental diversities and new relationalities in Singapore
How best to integrate migrant workers in host societies has been a longstanding question in the study of migration and globalisation. Scholars have been conceptualising new modes of transnational mobilities that point to the politics of differential inclusion to address encounters between migrants and locals in Asian global cities. This article uses an instructive case study of temporary, low-wage male migrant workers in Singapore and the issue o…
Ministering to the Middle
Christian megachurches have been growing in members, organization, and financial resources in the large cities of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines and in Singapore. However, they remain as religious minorities facing an asymmetrical balance of political power due to the Islamization of politics, strong state secularism, or the close entanglement of the political elites with majority Catholicism. We propose a framework of minoritarian poli…
Chinese privilege’ as shortcut in Singapore
We disagree with Humairah Zainal and Walid Jumblatt Abdullah that Chinese privilege exists in Singapore politics and that it is perpetuated by the political hegemony of the long-ruling People’s Action Party (PAP). Consequentially, we disagree that ‘Chinese privilege’ is thus a useful concept for understanding politics in Singapore. Our rejoinder argues that ‘Chinese privilege’ is under-specified and decontextualized by the authors, used uncritica…
Points of persuasion
Geographers and historians have contributed to a well-established literature on how places become repositories of inherited meanings and contested memories. Much less attention has been afforded to space and place as future-making resources. In this article, we consider how extant places feature in the imagination, planning and development of ex novo cities. Focusing on three new administrative capitals in Southeast Asia - Putrajaya (in Malaysia)…
Beyond Mall Christianity
The global spread of Pentecostalism has been facilitated by a combination of transnational impulses and indigenizing interests. In the case of independent Pentecostal megachurches, their growth in urban centres is reflected in both Western and Asian societies. Megachurches in America and Southeast Asia have flourished because of their unique blend of middle- class congregants, appeal to consumerist and popular culture, as well as their compatibil…
Affective identities and the recontextualisation of elite schools for globalisation in Singapore
This paper discusses how the elite schools in Singapore have been recontextualising their pedagogical programmes, as the public education system adjusts to the developmental state's balancing act to continue with nation building while remaking Singapore into a global city. The elite schools have been updating their pedagogical programmes to produce the new generation of national leaders and, at the same time, preserve the formally meritocratic sy…
S outheast A sia
The expansion of the capitalist world system into Southeast Asia, and its transformation through the two centuries from the 1800s, explains the form and thrust of urbanization in the region. This history could be heuristically divided into three overlapping periods marked by the dominance of mercantile, industrial, and postindustrial capitalism. In each period, the urbanization driven by political and economic forces turned on a specific axis. Du…
Super-diversity and the bio-politics of migrant worker exclusion in Singapore
For super-diversity to describe the diversification of Asian global cities, it should be discussed with reference to existing regimes governing diversity. In Singapore, the postcolonial state instituted the multiracialism of equality between the ‘races’ of colonial governmentality, so as to manage the ethnic diversity of ‘the plural society’. However, contemporary immigrations disrupted this multiracialism. The political response focused on manag…
Family Justice, “Asian Values” and the Politics of Ambivalence in Singapore
In recent years, Singapore made significant reforms towards the establishment of a dedicated family justice system, setting up the Family Justice Courts and enacting new laws to better manage the divorce process and the protection of children. Related policy changes have also been implemented to provide and support families that were previously considered non-traditional and even deviant. Rhetorically, the state, led by the long-ruling People’s A…
What's it like to be a Singaporean intellectual? An interview with Chua Beng Huat
Professor Chua Beng Huat is an internationally well-known and respected sociologist and cultural studies scholar from Singapore. In early 2015, his long-time collaborator and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies co-founder, Kuan-Hsing Chen, and his former student turned present colleague, Daniel Goh, interviewed Chua on the eve of his retirement as the Head of the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. This wide-ranging interview…
Introduction
The relationship between the sacred and the urban remains understudied. This special issue studies this relationship by focusing on urban religious aspirations in diverse globalizing Asian cities. The approach builds on the sacred geographies and sociology of secularization literatures. It is argued that religious practitioners respond to urbanization by inventing new conceptions of the urban to make sense of secularizing spaces. In turn, the sec…
Secular space, spiritual community and the hybrid urbanisms of Christianity in Hong Kong and Singapore
This article seeks to explain the rapid growth of evangelical Christianity in Hong Kong and Singapore over the last few decades in the adaptation of Christianity to the secular urbanization experienced in the two cities. The author argues that Christian responses involve both the innovation of Christian territorial practices to meaningfully navigate and engage the planned city as well as community practices seeking to produce place-bound Christia…
Colonialism, Neopatrimonialism, and Hybrid State Formation in Malaysia and the Philippines
In Weberian scholarship, conventional wisdom views the corruption of the modern rational-legal bureaucratic state by local patrimonialisms as an endemic feature in non-Western postcolonial state formation. The resultant neopatrimonial state is often blamed for the social, political, and economic ills plaguing these societies. This essay challenges conventional wisdom and argues that neopatrimonialism is a process of hybrid state formation that ha…
Elite schools, postcolonial Chineseness and hegemonic masculinities in Singapore
The educational reproduction of elite masculinity in postcolonial societies has not been properly studied. This is partly because the postcolonial masculinities of non-western elites are accomplished through the cultivation of naturalized practices signifying the body politic of the nation-state. In Singapore, same-sex elite schools of colonial heritage, particularly Christian mission schools, play a central role in cultivating elite masculinity.…
Singapore, the state, and decolonial spatiality
The proposition that Singapore is a successful Asian model of urban culture and political economy is a discomforting one. I had thought this was a postcolonial problem of hybrid identity making and political practice. But in my attempts to study Singapore society, from street carnivals to popular religion, I have ended up facing the state's knowing rationalizations in the discursive materials and material space itself. When I focus on the state a…
Introduction
This special issue seeks to highlight the ways in which diverse Asian cities - Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore - exceed current urban theorization. Modest, but nonetheless more-than-local re-theorization, can proceed from such empirical excess, which itself can only be derived from sustained ethnographic examination of cities in all their diversity. Relatedly, we cast Asia as a frontier for ethnographic strategizing - where, rather than merely importing…
Between History and Heritage
The three cities of Malacca, Penang and Singapore share a century-long history as the British Straits Settlements, with similar multicultural traditions and urban morphology of dense shophouse districts. In the post-colonial period, these have been the basis for the production of heritage for urban renewal, civic identity formation, and international tourism. Yet, each city has approached the production of its history as heritage in different way…
Religion, Tradition and the Popular
Multicultural carnivals and the politics of the spectacle in global Singapore
Carnivals have historically played an important role in the multicultural life of Singapore society. This article looks at multicultural carnivals that today play a key role in the transformation of Singapore into a “global city” and its attendant cultural politics. I invoke as my starting point Bakhtin's observation that formerly subversive carnivals have become mere spectacles. I analyze two carnivals that engage emergent racial-class fissures …
From Colonial Pluralism to Postcolonial Multiculturalism
In postcolonial societies, multiculturalism is a historical problem conditioned by colonial racial knowledge and state formation on the one hand, and by the ethnic conflicts of decolonization on the other. The reality and legacy of colonial racisms in colonized societies were not straightforward affairs. Anthropological knowledge was crucial for the construction of colonial state institutions, where racial ethnography determined the way each nati…
States of Ethnography
The metaphoric reading of native life as an unopened book by two ranking colonial administrators and authoritative ethnographers in Malaya and the Philippines cannot be a simple coincidence. Clifford and Barrows represent two empires, one conservative and peaking, the other liberal and ascendant, meeting in 'the Malay Archipelago.' Clifford was a product of the rugged and cultured education demanded of British aristocratic scions, while Barrows e…
Urban aspirations and Asian cosmopolitanisms
Introduction
10.1177/0042098012452454
Expatriate Identities in Postcolonial Organizations
Chinese privilege’ as shortcut in Singapore
We disagree with Humairah Zainal and Walid Jumblatt Abdullah that Chinese privilege exists in Singapore politics and that it is perpetuated by the political hegemony of the long-ruling People’s Action Party (PAP). Consequentially, we disagree that ‘Chinese privilege’ is thus a useful concept for understanding politics in Singapore. Our rejoinder argues that ‘Chinese privilege’ is under-specified and decontextualized by the authors, used uncritica…
Chinese Religion and the Challenge of Modernity in Malaysia and Singapore
Walking the Global City
This article discusses the politics of rhythm and memory surrounding urban walking in Singapore. In recent years, the developmental state has organized programs to encourage ways to walk the global city it has built in the embrace of transnational capital. In the heritage trails in the city center and the inaugural Singapore Biennale of international art, which mapped the heritage trails, the state has appropriated historical space to synchronize…
Points of persuasion
Geographers and historians have contributed to a well-established literature on how places become repositories of inherited meanings and contested memories. Much less attention has been afforded to space and place as future-making resources. In this article, we consider how extant places feature in the imagination, planning and development of ex novo cities. Focusing on three new administrative capitals in Southeast Asia - Putrajaya (in Malaysia)…
State carnivals and the subvention of multiculturalism in Singapore1
Increasing attention is being paid to the specificities of Asian multiculturalism in relation to ethnic pluralism, citizenship and developmental state formation. This article examines these relationships by analysing three carnival events in colonial and postcolonial Singapore that were organized by the state to promote its official multiculturalism. Through its cultural logics of horizontal racial segmentation, cascading symbolic authority from …
State and Social Christianity in Post-colonial Singapore
In the context of Christianity's rapid growth in post-colonial Singapore, why has Pentecostalism replaced liberal Christianity as the dominant form in the last few decades? Going beyond existing cultural explanations of Pentecostal affinity with Asian folk religions and the modernization thesis, I look at the Church as social movement, as social Christianity engaging, specifically in Singapore, the post-colonial developmental state. Pentecostalis…
Multicultural carnivals and the politics of the spectacle in global Singapore
Carnivals have historically played an important role in the multicultural life of Singapore society. This article looks at multicultural carnivals that today play a key role in the transformation of Singapore into a “global city” and its attendant cultural politics. I invoke as my starting point Bakhtin's observation that formerly subversive carnivals have become mere spectacles. I analyze two carnivals that engage emergent racial-class fissures …
Elite schools, postcolonial Chineseness and hegemonic masculinities in Singapore
The educational reproduction of elite masculinity in postcolonial societies has not been properly studied. This is partly because the postcolonial masculinities of non-western elites are accomplished through the cultivation of naturalized practices signifying the body politic of the nation-state. In Singapore, same-sex elite schools of colonial heritage, particularly Christian mission schools, play a central role in cultivating elite masculinity.…
Introduction
This special issue seeks to highlight the ways in which diverse Asian cities - Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore - exceed current urban theorization. Modest, but nonetheless more-than-local re-theorization, can proceed from such empirical excess, which itself can only be derived from sustained ethnographic examination of cities in all their diversity. Relatedly, we cast Asia as a frontier for ethnographic strategizing - where, rather than merely importing…
Recentering Southeast Asian Cities
For nearly two decades now, scholars have been heralding the arrival of new urbanisms. One debate in rapidly urbanizing Southeast Asia concerns the convergence of Western and Asian urban processes, and the riposte that interaction between globalizing processes and the historical momentum of local and regional forces make for complex Asian urbanisms. In recent years, attention has been drawn to the impact of decentralization, with consequences for…
Introduction
The relationship between the sacred and the urban remains understudied. This special issue studies this relationship by focusing on urban religious aspirations in diverse globalizing Asian cities. The approach builds on the sacred geographies and sociology of secularization literatures. It is argued that religious practitioners respond to urbanization by inventing new conceptions of the urban to make sense of secularizing spaces. In turn, the sec…
Oriental Purity
Studies of Asian values discourse emphasize its link to the ideological articulation of Singapore's ruling elite in contemporary circumstances of global modernity. Significantly, an influential commentary has reflexively raised the postcolonial discomfort connected to the hybrid political space of Singapore. Focusing on postcolonial discomfort as the central problem, I locate the articulation of Asian values in the psychic-cultural consequences o…
Migrant worker recreational centres, accidental diversities and new relationalities in Singapore
How best to integrate migrant workers in host societies has been a longstanding question in the study of migration and globalisation. Scholars have been conceptualising new modes of transnational mobilities that point to the politics of differential inclusion to address encounters between migrants and locals in Asian global cities. This article uses an instructive case study of temporary, low-wage male migrant workers in Singapore and the issue o…
Unofficial contentions
This paper reads the debates of the Straits Settlements Legislative Council to trace the political contentions over policies affecting the Chinese community in Malaya. These contentions brought the Straits Chinese unofficials to engage the racial ambivalence of British rule in Malaya, in which the Straits Chinese was located as both a liberal subject and an object of colonial difference. Contrary to conventional historiography which portrays Stra…
Capital and the Transfiguring Monumentality of Raffles Hotel
Celebrated as a leading luxury hotel in the world, the Raffles Hotel stands as a monument to Singapore’s status as a global city of commerce. The century‐old Hotel also represents successful postcolonial heritage conservation. Drawing from archival and published sources, I analyze the Hotel as a changing cultural form in the historical transformation of Singapore by the circuits of global capital, from imperial capitalism, through the postcolonia…
Introduction
Imperialism and `medieval' natives
The location of Orientalist racial difference and Ornamental class familiarity in imperial discourse can be combined to understand the nuances of colonial representations. Revisiting the Malay image, I argue that the medievalist convention of portraying the native as situated in intermediate evolution between savagery and Western civilization was crucial for imperialism. The Malay image shifted from the representation of orientals exhibiting inco…
The Politics of the Environment in Singapore? Lessons from a "Strange" Case
Rethinking Resurgent Christianity in Singapore
Intersectionality, interdisciplinarity and mental health in education
Rethinking Resurgent Christianity in Singapore
The Politics of the Environment in Singapore? Lessons from a "Strange" Case
The State and the culture of excess
Imperialism and `medieval' natives
The location of Orientalist racial difference and Ornamental class familiarity in imperial discourse can be combined to understand the nuances of colonial representations. Revisiting the Malay image, I argue that the medievalist convention of portraying the native as situated in intermediate evolution between savagery and Western civilization was crucial for imperialism. The Malay image shifted from the representation of orientals exhibiting inco…
From Colonial Pluralism to Postcolonial Multiculturalism
In postcolonial societies, multiculturalism is a historical problem conditioned by colonial racial knowledge and state formation on the one hand, and by the ethnic conflicts of decolonization on the other. The reality and legacy of colonial racisms in colonized societies were not straightforward affairs. Anthropological knowledge was crucial for the construction of colonial state institutions, where racial ethnography determined the way each nati…
States of Ethnography
The metaphoric reading of native life as an unopened book by two ranking colonial administrators and authoritative ethnographers in Malaya and the Philippines cannot be a simple coincidence. Clifford and Barrows represent two empires, one conservative and peaking, the other liberal and ascendant, meeting in 'the Malay Archipelago.' Clifford was a product of the rugged and cultured education demanded of British aristocratic scions, while Barrows e…
Genèse de l'État colonial
Cet article dépasse le clivage entre les explications socioculturelles et néo-weberiennes de la formation des États coloniaux en se concentrant sur la figure des gouverneurs coloniaux comme principaux agents dans le processus de construction de l’État qui se joue entre la métropole et la colonie. Il montre que la résistance de la part des populations locales était un élément central de la formation de l’État qui « interférait » avec les rationali…
A New God in the Diaspora? Muneeswaran Worship in Contemporary Singapore
Postcolonial disorientations
This essay argues that American colonial governmentality in the early twentieth century was constituted by an ethnographic discourse that was inflected by an imperial frontier orientation. The frontier governmentality interdicts and disciplines Filipino society and culture for colonial formation, thus planting American frontier dreams in the state's education and land policies. But it was driven by the contradictions between two types of interdic…
Introduction
Chinese Religion and the Challenge of Modernity in Malaysia and Singapore
Anoma Pieris, Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes
Unofficial contentions
This paper reads the debates of the Straits Settlements Legislative Council to trace the political contentions over policies affecting the Chinese community in Malaya. These contentions brought the Straits Chinese unofficials to engage the racial ambivalence of British rule in Malaya, in which the Straits Chinese was located as both a liberal subject and an object of colonial difference. Contrary to conventional historiography which portrays Stra…
State and Social Christianity in Post-colonial Singapore
In the context of Christianity's rapid growth in post-colonial Singapore, why has Pentecostalism replaced liberal Christianity as the dominant form in the last few decades? Going beyond existing cultural explanations of Pentecostal affinity with Asian folk religions and the modernization thesis, I look at the Church as social movement, as social Christianity engaging, specifically in Singapore, the post-colonial developmental state. Pentecostalis…
Capital and the Transfiguring Monumentality of Raffles Hotel
Celebrated as a leading luxury hotel in the world, the Raffles Hotel stands as a monument to Singapore’s status as a global city of commerce. The century‐old Hotel also represents successful postcolonial heritage conservation. Drawing from archival and published sources, I analyze the Hotel as a changing cultural form in the historical transformation of Singapore by the circuits of global capital, from imperial capitalism, through the postcolonia…
Urban aspirations and Asian cosmopolitanisms
Empire's Proxy
State carnivals and the subvention of multiculturalism in Singapore1
Increasing attention is being paid to the specificities of Asian multiculturalism in relation to ethnic pluralism, citizenship and developmental state formation. This article examines these relationships by analysing three carnival events in colonial and postcolonial Singapore that were organized by the state to promote its official multiculturalism. Through its cultural logics of horizontal racial segmentation, cascading symbolic authority from …
Expatriate Identities in Postcolonial Organizations
Oriental Purity
Studies of Asian values discourse emphasize its link to the ideological articulation of Singapore's ruling elite in contemporary circumstances of global modernity. Significantly, an influential commentary has reflexively raised the postcolonial discomfort connected to the hybrid political space of Singapore. Focusing on postcolonial discomfort as the central problem, I locate the articulation of Asian values in the psychic-cultural consequences o…
Introduction
10.1177/0042098012452454
Multicultural carnivals and the politics of the spectacle in global Singapore
Carnivals have historically played an important role in the multicultural life of Singapore society. This article looks at multicultural carnivals that today play a key role in the transformation of Singapore into a “global city” and its attendant cultural politics. I invoke as my starting point Bakhtin's observation that formerly subversive carnivals have become mere spectacles. I analyze two carnivals that engage emergent racial-class fissures …
Walking the Global City
This article discusses the politics of rhythm and memory surrounding urban walking in Singapore. In recent years, the developmental state has organized programs to encourage ways to walk the global city it has built in the embrace of transnational capital. In the heritage trails in the city center and the inaugural Singapore Biennale of international art, which mapped the heritage trails, the state has appropriated historical space to synchronize…
Recentering Southeast Asian Cities
For nearly two decades now, scholars have been heralding the arrival of new urbanisms. One debate in rapidly urbanizing Southeast Asia concerns the convergence of Western and Asian urban processes, and the riposte that interaction between globalizing processes and the historical momentum of local and regional forces make for complex Asian urbanisms. In recent years, attention has been drawn to the impact of decentralization, with consequences for…
Between History and Heritage
The three cities of Malacca, Penang and Singapore share a century-long history as the British Straits Settlements, with similar multicultural traditions and urban morphology of dense shophouse districts. In the post-colonial period, these have been the basis for the production of heritage for urban renewal, civic identity formation, and international tourism. Yet, each city has approached the production of its history as heritage in different way…
Sociology (45 works) · Political science (43 works) · Law (35 works) · Socioeconomic Development in Asia (35 works) · Politics (29 works) · Gender Studies (24 works) · Law (24 works) · Asian Studies and History (19 works) · Gender Studies (17 works) · Colonialism (12 works)