Senior Lecturer
National University of Singapore
Senior Lecturer
National University of Singapore
SPECIAL ISSUES
Below is a list of special issues I co-edited. All special issues were workshopped either online or in person. I helped to select the articles for the special issue and closely worked with many of the authors to help prepare their articles for publication.
Culture Wars in Asia: Revisiting "Asian Values" in Gender Politics
July 3, 2024
This special issue aims to interrogate the “culture wars” in East and
Southeast Asia as reflected in the tension between burgeoning gender politics and the enduring privilege of heteronormative families. In this special issue, we examine this implication in the context of gender politics in East and Southeast Asia by
revisiting the “Asian values” discourse of the 1990s. Political rhetoric on “Asian values” has waned, but issues arising from the “Asian values” discourse are still relevant. In particular, ideas and practices of gender extend their hold beyond political rhetoric because of the focus on family cohesion and clearly-defined gender roles in the “Asian values” discourse.
The Political Mobilisation of Criminal Law and its Resistance in the Global South
February 1, 2024
The articles presented in this special issue explore the relationship between politics and law in the context of the Global South. While some of the contributions examined this relationship through the symbolic power of the law, others focused on how violence is embedded into the relationship between law and politics. The first group, which focused on the symbolic dimension of power relations, dug into struggles to either accommodate political projects into the existing law or whenever such interpretation was not possible, to propose new legislation consistent with those political goals. Meanwhile, the other group of contributions, those who paid special attention to the association between law and violence, described how the relationship between politics and law is centred disputed legitimacy of law in those societies. This introduction discusses how these two approaches complement each other and offer us a better understanding of the particular role law plays in societies in the Global South.
Stigmatisation, Identities and the Law: Asian and Comparative Perspectives
October 11, 2021
Impressive growth in Asia, as one of most dynamic regions in the world, sometimes happens at the expense of marginalisation. Individuals who do not fit normative ideals, who are deemed economically unproductive or who do not participate in heterosex-centred reproduction are often regarded as different, even deviant, and come to take on or are given identities that are marginalised. Stigmatisation can be pronounced in homogenous or insular societies and communities that use ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ as a justification to extract conformity. Against this backdrop, we sought papers that would speak to the theme of this Special Issue. We were interested in the processes of stigmatisation involving a range of interactions and relationships, including being treated as burdensome and unproductive members of society, or regarded as a threat to the social order, as well as social processes in which those who are stigmatised respond to such treatment by coming up with strategies, taking action or deciding not to take action.
Continuities and Ruptures in Global North Legal Pressures on Global South Societies
September 18, 2018
This special issue is an interdisciplinary analysis of the challenges faced in Southeast Asia to examine the concepts of “rule of law” and “human rights”. Although the authors have written their pieces through various disciplinary lenses—political science, anthropology, law, history and philosophy—a shared feature of the articles included in this issue is that they do not approach these issues from an ‘Asian’ or a ‘Universal’ perspective. They reject both because the former analyses the region in isolation from the rest of the world, and the latter reads regional problems with an ahistorical universal lens and by doing so reproduces a Western or colonial ethnocentrism. Instead, they propose to engage in these diverse regional issues by breaking with the colonial mentality that seeks the source of knowledge in central societies, to take advantage of the experiences and knowledge from other societies of the Global South that have similar experiences. It is therefore important to understand the relevance of this critical shift that accompanies the reference to the Global South and the idea of constructing a South-South dialogue.