Orlando Woods
Biographic Data
| ID | 572941 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Orlando Woods |
| GIVEN NAMES | Orlando |
| FAMILY NAME | Woods |
| SIGNATURE | WOODS O |
| AFFILIATIONS | Singapore Management University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9218-1264 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 105 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 506 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 105 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Public Housing and the Forging of Future Citizens: Experiencing Convenience, Delay, and Deferral Through the Lived Realities of Singapore’s Smart Nation
How do you fix knowledge in place? Digital nomads and infrastructural stickiness
Remote work has become increasingly accessible due to the growing acceptance of remote work arrangements following the COVID-19 pandemic. Some state actors, especially in countries which face a shortage of digital talent and have reputations as leisure-tourism destinations, have begun considering the opportunities for digital transformation or workforce upskilling that highly skilled remote workers may offer. This paper develops the case of remot…
Urban innovation in the smart city: Technologies, transformations and new regimes of governance
The experimental governance of urban nature in Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia is urbanising at unprecedented speed and in unique, and sometimes paradigmatic, ways. As its cities grow, so too does the place and governance of urban nature require critical interrogation as cities start to develop new and more extensive relationships with their non-human inhabitants and natural environments. The articles that comprise this theme issue consider how the governance of nature in urbanising Southeast Asia is a resolu…
The Affective Economy of Toxic Atmospheres: Sensory Governance, Ecological Intelligence, and the Performative Politics of Urban Mosquito Management
This article considers how atmospheres can play a powerful role in troubling the management of nature in the multispecies city. It brings the cyclical nature of atmospheric causes and effects, the affective values and il/logics that determine human responses to nonhuman threats, and the misguided and potentially deleterious health outcomes that ensue into one analytical frame. Drawing on the empirical case of urban mosquito management in Singapor…
Modelling nature? The digital twinning and untwinning of urban farms
Data-driven solutions and innovations have been extended to various industries, including agriculture, to increase efficiency. With the emergence of smart farming and agriculture 4.0, advanced technologies such as IoT, big data, machine learning, and cloud computing are increasingly integrated into farming. Among these, technologies such as digital models, digital twins and the metaverse are now used to control various farming activities remotely…
Assembling diasporic faith amidst China’s rise: (De)territorialization and the multi-scalar production of the Guangze Zunwang cult in the Chinese diaspora
Remaking the smart city through the Covid-19 pandemic: Seoul, Singapore, Taipei
Navigating AI–nature frictions: Autonomous vehicle testing and nature-based constraints
In cities, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) is being directed towards transforming different aspects of urban life. These applications take material form in urban spaces, with autonomous vehicles (AVs) providing a prominent example. AI systems rely on large volumes of data on their surroundings to refine the algorithms and enhance the accuracy of prediction for operational efficiency and safety. However, such algorithmic learning a…
Seeing beyond the state: Private sector-led smart city governance in BSD City, Indonesia
In recent decades new cities have sprung up at a rapid pace, aided by private sector funding ( Hogan et al., 2012 ). Within the realm of smart city development, private sector influence over urban governance has substantially increased, particularly through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). However, in Indonesia, there is an emerging trend of the private sector exerting significant control over ‘independent’ greenfield smart cities beyond state…
Smart Cities Beyond Methodological Cityism: Foregrounding Developmentalism, Scalar Flexing and the Rebranding of the ‘Urban’
In this article we show that in Southeast Asia, smart city development has become a type of digital urban transformation that is not targeted towards any particular territorial formation or settlement. Instead, development‐oriented states in the region leverage the smart city rhetoric as a nationwide branding strategy to leapfrog development stages. Such smart city policies are infused with a scalar logic—which we call ‘scalar flexing’—that captu…
The citizen and the smart city: A global comparison of institutional logics
Critical urbanists’ placement of smart city initiatives in Western Europe or North America mostly on “low” rungs of participatory ladders or scaffolds does not mean that smart urban development connotes democracy-eroding neoliberalization everywhere. This article offers a more globally variegated and dynamic understanding of the relationship between citizens and smart cities. We apply an institutional logics frame to the citizen- smart city nexus…
Forging more-than-Indian citizenship pathways: (Inter)national education, religious values, and new frontiers of multicultural belonging in Singapore
Discontent in the world city of Singapore
A burgeoning literature on ‘left behind’ places has emerged that captures the backlash against globalisation and highlights the locales that lag world cities. This paper integrates the ‘left behind’ and world cities literatures through the lens of discontent in the context of Singapore, using sentiment analysis and topic modelling as well as interviews with local professionals to unpack the multidimensional aspects of discontent. Focusing on the …
Right‐sizing the smart city in Southeast Asia
The idea of right‐sizing, or the process of adjusting the size of a city to maximise the efficient use of resources, has traditionally been used in strategic management and the resizing of shrinking cities to promote efficient urban development. Concurrently, in contemporary discourse, the sizing of smart cities has emerged as a critical topic, as size impacts the implementation of smart initiatives. Smaller cities offer the advantage of serving …
Casual killing in the home: Ecological citizenship and the micro-geopolitics of mosquito cohabitation
This article explores how the visceral acts of being bitten by and killing mosquitoes can underpin the formation of ecological citizenship. This form of citizenship is premised on human-nature entanglement and raises questions concerning how the rights and responsibilities stemming from such entanglement become distributed across the public and private domains. As a space in which mosquito cohabitation is contested daily, the home is a key site t…
What Are the Limits to Smart Innovation? The Digital Underground Initiative and New Frontiers of “Smartness” in Singapore
Ecological responsibility in the city: The Surfaces and Volumes of Urban Mosquito Management
A comparison of comparisons: Evidence from an international comparative study of ‘smart cities
Every year the list lengthens of cities with some sort of ‘smart city’ public policy. In some, it emerges as the latest in a long line of urban digital and information communication policies. In others, the introduction of the notion of the ‘smart city’ marks a departure from past approaches to public policy. Additionally, the more studies emerge of actual smart city policies, then the less definitional agreement there seems to be. Nevertheless, …
The experiential value of gambling in f2p gamespaces
This article explores the experiential value of gambling within free-to-play (f2p) gamespaces. In doing so, it offers a more balanced understanding of the gambling/gaming interplay. Whilst existing understandings tend to focus on the assumedly predatory monetisation techniques that players are subjected to by game developers, I instead argue that a logic of gambling is integral to the f2p experience economy of Asian players. Drawing on an analysi…
Engineering immunity? Biotechnical governance and the experimental failures of project wolbachia in Singapore
This paper introduces the idea of 'experimental failure' to critically interrogate the limits of engineering biological systems for urban governance. Whilst experimentation through projects related to smart cities and eco-cities has garnered significant attention, biotechnical experiments--which manipulate living organisms through technology--remain underexplored. Unlike interventions leveraging non-living, inanimate systems, engineering life mus…
(Un)mapping the Punjab Onto Singapore's Gurdwaras: Diasporic Territorialities and Decolonial Spaces of Sikh Socialisation
This paper explores an alternative territorial sensibility – ‘diasporic territoriality’ – that is rooted in the search for belonging outside of a putative ‘homeland’ amongst dis/placed communities. Drawing on ethnographic research with 26 members of Singapore’s Sikh diaspora, we examine the everyday spaces of diasporic belonging that simultaneously reproduce and resist colonial imaginings of Punjabi territory. Many first-generation diasporas cont…
The Transcendent Patterning of Medical Pluralism: Religion and Medical Practices Among Miao Migrants in China
Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the medical practices of Miao internal migrants in China, in this article we critique the hierarchical and discrete ontologies of "pluralism" prevalent in anthropological studies of medical pluralism. It examines how Miao migrants construct an informal pluralistic medical system that integrates shamanistic ritual healing, herbalism, and "folk" biomedicine within a pragmatically grounded yet spiritually coherent …
Conditional inclusion in the sensory contact zone: Coexisting with desis in Singapore's gurdwaras
The Power and the Politics of Embodying Dancehall
This chapter argues that the embodiment of dancehall culture in Singapore can lead to emancipation from, and tensions within, the religious self. Dancehall, a cultural movement that emerged in Jamaica in the late 1970s, encapsulates a distinct style of music, dance, dress, and attitude that has become known for hyper-sexualized representations of the gendered body. The embodiment of dancehall culture in Singapore found particular appeal amongst M…
The ideological alignment of smart urbanism in Singapore: Critical reflections on a political paradox
Over the past decade, much has been written about the potential of smart urbanism to bring about various and lasting forms of betterment. The embedding of digital technologies within urban infrastructures has been well documented, and the efficiencies of smart models of urban governance and management have been lauded. More recently, however, the discourse has been labelled ‘hegemonic’, and accused of developing a view of smart technology that is…
New cultures of care? The spatio-temporal modalities of home-based smart eldercare technologies in Singapore
Increasingly, technology-enabled strategies of eldercare are being developed and deployed to minimize the socio-economic costs of ageing. As part of this shift, home-based 'smart' technologies have been embraced as a way of enabling ageing-in-place. Smart technologies flatten space and time, and can increase the reach of caregivers. In this sense, they foreground the emergence of new cultures of care. Through an empirical focus on the triallists …
The digital subversion of urban space: Power, Performance and Grime
Digital technologies play an increasingly prominent role in the reproduction of society and space. Rather than being studied as a separate category of understanding, the ways in which such technologies intersect with and inflect upon the real world has provided a recent focus of research. Urban music is inherently spatial, but the ways in which digital technologies have enabled artists to resist injustice, to reproduce space and to reclaim the ri…
Converting Houses into Churches: The Mobility, Fission, and Sacred Networks of Evangelical House Churches in Sri Lanka
In this paper I examine the processes and politics associated with the formation of evangelical house churches in Sri Lanka. In doing so, I show how the sacred space of the house church is constructed through the development of sacred networks, which emerge when a group of Christians assemble for prayer and worship. Sacred networks grant the house church an important degree of mobility, but they also encourage church fission. Whilst the house chu…
The geographies of religious conversion
The paper reviews the corpus of research that attempts to explain the process of religious conversion, and explores the ways in which geographers can add new perspectives to the discourse. It argues that religious conversion is a phenomenon that goes beyond the reorientation of individual belief, and is instead a process of change that involves the (re)definition of self and other. Five conceptual frames are proposed – (1) conversion of space; (2…
Forging alternatively sacred spaces in Singapore's integrated religious marketplace
This paper expands the notion of sacred space within the geographies of religion by arguing that spaces of religious praxis need to be understood in relation to the broader spatial logics within which they are embedded. Given that the spatial logics of urban environments tend to be secular and neoliberal in nature, it considers how religious groups respond to the realities of the marketplaces in which they operate by forging 'alternatively sacred…
Sonic spaces, spiritual bodies: The affective experience of the roots reggae soundsystem
This paper advances a new understanding of spirituality within the geographies of religion. It builds on the premise that spirituality is latent within every body and argues that it becomes manifest in response to an affective experience. Such experiences are often sensory in nature, rendering spiritual affect an embodied phenomenon that can be understood through the concept of an “embodied hierophany.” By exploring the affective experience of th…
Disjunctures of belonging and belief: Christian migrants and the bordering of identity in S ingapore
Migration results in people that are different from one another living in closer physical proximity. Proximity increases the chances of encountering difference and can lead to both the formation of new communities and the strengthening of old. As a religion that claims to integrate people into a trans‐ethnic, transterritorial faith community, Christianity encourages such encounters and Christian groups play an important role in mediating them. Di…
Affective cosmopolitanisms in Singapore: Dancehall and the decolonisation of the self
This paper advances a new understanding of cosmopolitanism, one that is rooted in the affective potential of the body. It argues that while the self is often projected onto the body, so too can the body play an important role in (re)imagining the self. As such, the body can decolonise the self from the mind, from the expectations of society and culture, and from the normative epistemological underpinnings of academic knowledge production. I valid…
The spatial subversions of global citizenship education: Negotiating imagined inclusions and everyday exclusions in international schools in China
Clashing cyphers, contagious content: The digital geopolitics of grime
This paper seeks to expand popular geopolitics in line with the digital worlds in which many of us now live. By interpreting geopolitics as a method of cultural (re)production, it becomes a creative tool that can be used to shape and elevate the affective appeal of content. Digital technologies are centrally implicated in the production of such content. By decoupling space and time from their physical anchors in the real world, digital technologi…
Parallel Spaces of Migrant (Non-)Integration in Singapore: Latent Politics of Distance and Difference Within a Diverse Christian Community
This paper explores how the spatial practices of churches can lead to the (non-)integration of migrant communities. Whilst churches bring migrants and non-migrants together in space and time, so too can they cause them to become divided along ethnic, national, linguistic and/or class-based lines. In such cases, migrants can become integrated into a community of other migrants, which can discourage integration into the church-at-large, or into soc…
Spaces of the Religious Economy: Negotiating the Regulation of Religious Space in Singapore
Over the past three decades, the theory of religious economy has been established, applied, debated, developed, and rejected. It has proven to be as divisive as any 'general theory' of religion should be, and yet its core tenets continue to engage and unite scholars around the world. In response to broader shifts within the sociology of religion, this article reframes religious economy by advancing a spatial approach to its theorization. A spatia…
The spatial modalities of evangelical Christian growth in Sri Lanka: Evangelism, social ministry and the structural mosaic
This paper incorporates a melange of ideas into a new understanding of evangelical Christian growth. Existing explanations of growth are well rehearsed within the social sciences, and draw clear distinctions between the characteristics of evangelical organisations and the structural contexts in which they operate. A number of theoretical and empirical assumptions render such explanations applicable in some countries, but not others. Drawing on em…
Lived religion in a digital age: Technology, Affect and the Pervasive Space-Times of 'New' Religious Praxis
This paper explores how Christian practices of prayer are being reconfigured through digital media in Singapore. Although digital technologies are an area of burgeoning interest amongst social and cultural geographers, the ways in which these technologies reconfigure the space-times of religious praxis and engender new affective relations or subjectivities of religion have not yet been embraced. This paper fills the lacuna by bringing existing st…
The Political Ecology of Death: Chinese Religion and The Affective Tensions of Secularised Burial Rituals in Singapore
This paper explores the political ecology of death and the affective tensions of secularised burial rituals in Singapore. Although scholars have recently acknowledged the roles of biopower and affect in shaping environmental politics, religion and death as socio-affective forces have not been substantively engaged with by political ecologists. We argue that death is inherently both a spiritual and ecological phenomenon, as it exposes not only the…
No destination: Queering Mobility Through the Virtuality of Movement
This article advances the epistemological potential that exists at the nexus of queer theory and mobilities research. It aims to queer mobility by rejecting the idea of the destination and embracing the virtuality of movement instead. In doing so, it draws on the queer symbolism of the closet and the cruise to highlight the heteronormative framing that has come to define and constrain the new mobilities paradigm. Arguing that anybody has the capa…
The state-led platformisation of financial services: Frictionless ecosystems and an expansive logic of “smartness” in Singapore
The affective embeddings of gacha games: Aesthetic assemblages and the mediated expression of the self
This article argues that the motivations for investing money in gacha games can be a function of the affective embedding of players within the game, and the game within broader circuits of cultural affinity and appeal. While research on gacha games – and the specific role of loot boxes therein – has emphasised their associations with gambling, I contend that affect is another trigger that can motivate seemingly irrational playing behaviours. The …
Feminist geographies of online gaming
This paper identifies opportunities and pathways through which feminist digital geographies can expand into the realm of online gaming. Whilst research at the nexus of gender and online gaming has come a long way in the past two decades, geographical perspectives are noticeably lacking. They can contribute to the discourse by emphasising the contingent nature of online gamespaces, and how a gendered subject position might be redefined through, an…
Haptic heritage and the paradox of provenance within Singapore’s cottage food businesses
This paper offers a “more-than-representational” understanding of how heritage value is reproduced by cottage food businesses in Singapore. It advances the notion of haptic heritage to highlight the importance of touch and feel in inculcating food with a sense of heritage value. Haptic heritage is reproduced through the physical handling of ingredients in ways that contribute to more “authentic” products. However, it also foregrounds food product…
Smart eldercare in Singapore: Negotiating agency and apathy at the margins
Sri Lanka's Informal Religious Economy: Evangelical Competitiveness and Buddhist Hegemony in Perspective
Existing religious economy models maintain that as religious regulation increases, levels of interreligious competition decrease. But new understandings of the market dynamics of religious oligopolies necessitate new understandings of religious competitiveness. A relational model of competitiveness using the case of evangelical Christianity in Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka is proposed. In Sri Lanka the informal religious economy is defined by compe…
When planetary cosmopolitanism meets the Buddhist ethic: Recycling, karma and popular ecology in Singapore
By thinking with and through Buddhist cosmology, this paper explores the emergence of an ethical sensibility—what we call planetary cosmopolitanism—that is based on not just a spatially expanded ethic of care to ecological worlds, but also a temporally extended sense of justice to the future Earth. This transtemporal sense of ethical becoming reflects how the possibility of future ‘rebirth’ and accountability for past actions can motivate new eco…
Class(ify)ing Christianity in Singapore: Tracing the interlinked spaces of privilege and position
This paper considers how two facets of identity—religion and class—are performed, (re)produced and negotiated within the spaces of the Christian school, home and church in Singapore. We show how the social structuring of one space can inform and influence the structuring of another. Spaces of Christianity in Singapore tend to be mutually reinforcing, strengthening the linkages between religion and class, and in particular reifying the position of…
The geographies of religious conversion
The paper reviews the corpus of research that attempts to explain the process of religious conversion, and explores the ways in which geographers can add new perspectives to the discourse. It argues that religious conversion is a phenomenon that goes beyond the reorientation of individual belief, and is instead a process of change that involves the (re)definition of self and other. Five conceptual frames are proposed – (1) conversion of space; (2…
Sri Lanka's Informal Religious Economy: Evangelical Competitiveness and Buddhist Hegemony in Perspective
Existing religious economy models maintain that as religious regulation increases, levels of interreligious competition decrease. But new understandings of the market dynamics of religious oligopolies necessitate new understandings of religious competitiveness. A relational model of competitiveness using the case of evangelical Christianity in Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka is proposed. In Sri Lanka the informal religious economy is defined by compe…
The spatial modalities of evangelical Christian growth in Sri Lanka: Evangelism, social ministry and the structural mosaic
This paper incorporates a melange of ideas into a new understanding of evangelical Christian growth. Existing explanations of growth are well rehearsed within the social sciences, and draw clear distinctions between the characteristics of evangelical organisations and the structural contexts in which they operate. A number of theoretical and empirical assumptions render such explanations applicable in some countries, but not others. Drawing on em…
Converting Houses into Churches: The Mobility, Fission, and Sacred Networks of Evangelical House Churches in Sri Lanka
In this paper I examine the processes and politics associated with the formation of evangelical house churches in Sri Lanka. In doing so, I show how the sacred space of the house church is constructed through the development of sacred networks, which emerge when a group of Christians assemble for prayer and worship. Sacred networks grant the house church an important degree of mobility, but they also encourage church fission. Whilst the house chu…
Cultural Politics
Postcolonial and poststructural ways of thinking have radically changed scholarly approaches to the understanding and interpretation of culture, and have revealed ways in which power is embedded within the production of cultural knowledge itself. They have also precipitated new approaches to understanding the politics of group and individual cultural identities, and the cultural politics of landscape. The development and uptake of nonrepresentati…
Mobile bodies, (im)mobile beliefs? Religious accord and discord as migratory outcomes
This article advances a new understanding of the outcomes that arise from the movement and settlement of religion. These outcomes can range from religious accord to discord; or, from the full integration of migrant religions to inter-religious conflict. It identifies two axes that determine such outcomes. The first relates to the interplay between transnational religious agency and the strength of local religious structures. Harder structures are…
Strategies of salvation: Evangelical Christian praxis and sites of degradation in Sri Lanka
This paper demonstrates how disasters create sites of degradation – potent spaces of upheaval and engagement – that are readily filled and exploited by evangelical Christian groups. In doing so, it explores how disasters provide opportunities for evangelical groups to gain a foothold in localities where Christian presence, and evangelical praxis, may otherwise be restricted. Drawing on qualitative data collected in Sri Lanka throughout 2010–2011,…
Smart eldercare in Singapore: Negotiating agency and apathy at the margins
The ideological alignment of smart urbanism in Singapore: Critical reflections on a political paradox
Over the past decade, much has been written about the potential of smart urbanism to bring about various and lasting forms of betterment. The embedding of digital technologies within urban infrastructures has been well documented, and the efficiencies of smart models of urban governance and management have been lauded. More recently, however, the discourse has been labelled ‘hegemonic’, and accused of developing a view of smart technology that is…
Sonic spaces, spiritual bodies: The affective experience of the roots reggae soundsystem
This paper advances a new understanding of spirituality within the geographies of religion. It builds on the premise that spirituality is latent within every body and argues that it becomes manifest in response to an affective experience. Such experiences are often sensory in nature, rendering spiritual affect an embodied phenomenon that can be understood through the concept of an “embodied hierophany.” By exploring the affective experience of th…
(Re)producing Buddhist hegemony in Sri Lanka: Advancing the discursive formations of self-Orientalism, religious (im)mobility and 'unethical' conversion
This paper explores how Buddhist groups in Sri Lanka attempt to suppress conversion to Christianity. Conversion to Christianity can dilute the power and legitimacy of Buddhist groups, which has caused them to promote a discourse of ‘unethical’ conversion. My argument is that such a discourse is self-Orientalising in nature, and is designed to enable the (re)production of Buddhist hegemony in Sri Lanka. By constructing Buddhists as vulnerable and …
Spaces of the Religious Economy: Negotiating the Regulation of Religious Space in Singapore
Over the past three decades, the theory of religious economy has been established, applied, debated, developed, and rejected. It has proven to be as divisive as any 'general theory' of religion should be, and yet its core tenets continue to engage and unite scholars around the world. In response to broader shifts within the sociology of religion, this article reframes religious economy by advancing a spatial approach to its theorization. A spatia…
Religious urbanism in Singapore: Competition, commercialism and compromise in the search for space
This article explores the recursive relationship between religious praxis and urban environments. It advances the concept of ‘religious urbanism’ to show how urban environments play an active role in shaping the praxis of religion, and how religious groups adopt secular logics in response to the pressures of urban environments. Such logics have given rise to new, more pragmatic forms of spatial reproduction that lead to the desecularisation of sp…
Disjunctures of belonging and belief: Christian migrants and the bordering of identity in S ingapore
Migration results in people that are different from one another living in closer physical proximity. Proximity increases the chances of encountering difference and can lead to both the formation of new communities and the strengthening of old. As a religion that claims to integrate people into a trans‐ethnic, transterritorial faith community, Christianity encourages such encounters and Christian groups play an important role in mediating them. Di…
Fractured Lives, Newfound Freedoms? The Dialectics of Religious Seekership among Chinese Migrants in Singapore
This article explores the negotiations involved in the process of Chinese migrants converting to Christianity in Singapore. For many Chinese people, migration involves being exposed to religion for the first time, and for some, it involves them converting to Christianity. In Singapore, the conversion of Chinese migrants to Christianity occurs in a context of “shared” Chinese ethnicity, which can provide both bridges and barriers to the formation …
Experimental practice: Technoscience, Alterontologies, and More-Than-Social Movements
Experimental practice: technoscience, alterontologies, and more-than-social movements." Social & Cultural Geography, 20(5), pp. 755–756
Restoration of an ancestral temple in Guangzhou, China: Re-Imagining History and Traditions Through Devotion to Art and Creation
Rapid modernization has brought about massive changes in the urban and rural landscapes of China. While many old places and ancient buildings have been pulled down and replaced with more modern alternatives, others have been protected and restored. These include ancient ancestral temples, an important cultural space in China. Previous research has shown how different level governments and rural communities work together to restore ancient temples…
Porous Religious Economies and the Problem of Regulating Religious Marketplaces
This paper reframes the theory of religious economy by developing an understanding of the effects of transnational religious influence on religious marketplaces. In doing so, it highlights the need to rethink the role of regulation in shaping the ways in which religious marketplaces operate. By reinterpreting regulation as the ability of the state to control the extent to which religious groups are able to access resources, it argues that transna…
Subverting the logics of “smartness” in Singapore: Smart eldercare and parallel regimes of sustainability
The territoriality of teams: Assembling power through the playing of Pokémon Go
This paper explores how the playing of Pokémon Go can cause power to be assembled, and team-based expressions of territoriality to manifest. By playing the game, players become embedded within digital assemblages of power, which they reproduce through their interactions with other players, game features, and public spaces. When digital assets—such as gyms—are indexed to public spaces, players work together in teams to compete for digital ownershi…
Free bodies, segmented selves: Paradoxical spaces of dancehall culture in Singapore
This paper contributes to the ongoing expansion of the geographies of encounter by considering how cultural encounters can lead to the realisation, and the segmentation, of the self. As much as cultural differences can be manifested, negotiated and managed externally, so too can these differences be internal states that are realised through engagements with the embodied self. Accordingly, segmented selves are an outcome of the desire for individu…
Gamifying place, reimagining publicness: The heterotopic inscriptions of Pokémon Go
This article explores the transformative effects of augmented reality mobile games on society and space. By layering playfulness onto public space through a digital interface, augmented reality mobile games create a pervasive sense of play that can be accessed by players potentially anywhere, and at any time. Games like these can therefore be understood as heterotopic inscriptions on otherwise mundane environments. Since being released in 2016, P…
Affective cosmopolitanisms in Singapore: Dancehall and the decolonisation of the self
This paper advances a new understanding of cosmopolitanism, one that is rooted in the affective potential of the body. It argues that while the self is often projected onto the body, so too can the body play an important role in (re)imagining the self. As such, the body can decolonise the self from the mind, from the expectations of society and culture, and from the normative epistemological underpinnings of academic knowledge production. I valid…
The spatial subversions of global citizenship education: Negotiating imagined inclusions and everyday exclusions in international schools in China
Alternative education spaces and pathways: Insights from an international Christian school in China
The nascent scholarship on geographies of alternative education focuses on alternative education spaces, mostly located in the UK, that resist and/or negotiate neoliberal restructuring of education, some of which cater to socially marginalised groups. In contrast, through an ethnographic focus on an underground Christian international school in China, we examine an alternative education space that responds to parents' aspirations for their childr…
Sociology (76 works) · Political science (68 works) · Law (50 works) · Politics (39 works) · Computer Science (34 works) · Socioeconomic Development in Asia (32 works) · Aesthetics (29 works) · Gender Studies (27 works) · Philosophy (27 works) · Law (25 works)