Aihwa Ong

Bio: Aihwa Ong is an academic researcher from University of California, Berkeley. The author has contributed to research in topics: Citizenship & Politics. The author has an hindex of 36, co-authored 69 publications receiving 14150 citations. Previous affiliations of Aihwa Ong include University of Michigan & Indiana University.

Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality

Abstract: Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Flexible citizenship: the cultural logics of transnationality Part 1 Emerging modernities 1 The geopolitics of cultural knowledge 2 A "momentary glow of fraternity" Part 2 Regimes and strategies 3 Fengshui and the limits to cultural accumulation 4 The Pacific shuttle: family, citizenship and capital Part 3 Translocal publics 5 The family romance of madarin capital 6 "A better tomorrow"?: the struggle for global visibility Part 4 Global futures 7 Saying no the West: Liberal reasoning in Asia 8 Zone of new soverignty Afterword: an anthropology of transnationality Notes Bibliography Index

Neoliberalism as exception

Abstract: Neoliberalism is commonly viewed as an economic doctrine that seeks to limit the scope of government. Some consider it a form of predatory capitalism with adverse effects on the Global South. In this groundbreaking work, Aihwa Ong offers an alternative view of neoliberalism as an extraordinarily malleable technology of governing that is taken up in different ways by different regimes, be they authoritarian, democratic, or communist. Ong shows how East and Southeast Asian states are making exceptions to their usual practices of governing in order to position themselves to compete in the global economy. As she demonstrates, a variety of neoliberal strategies of governing are re-engineering political spaces and populations. Ong’s ethnographic case studies illuminate experiments and developments such as China’s creation of special market zones within its socialist economy; pro-capitalist Islam and women’s rights in Malaysia; Singapore’s repositioning as a hub of scientific expertise; and flexible labor and knowledge regimes that span the Pacific. Ong traces how these and other neoliberal exceptions to business as usual are reconfiguring relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge, and sovereignty and territoriality. She argues that an interactive mode of citizenship is emerging, one that organizes people—and distributes rights and benefits to them—according to their marketable skills rather than according to their membership within nation-states. Those whose knowledge and skills are not assigned significant market value—such as migrant women working as domestic maids in many Asian cities—are denied citizenship. Nevertheless, Ong suggests that as the seam between sovereignty and citizenship is pried apart, a new space is emerging for NGOs to advocate for the human rights of those excluded by neoliberal measures of human worthiness.

Global assemblages : technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems

Abstract: Notes on Contributors.Acknowledgments.Part I: Introduction.1. Global Assemblages, Anthropological Problems. (Stephen J. Collier and Aihwa Ong).2. On Regimes of Living. (Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff).3. Midst Anthropology's Problems. (Paul Rabinow).Part II: Bioscience And Biological Life.Ethics of Technoscientific Objects.4. Stem Cells R Us: Emergent Life Forms and the Global Biological. (Sarah Franklin).5. Operability, Bioavailability, and Exception. (Lawrence Cohen).6. The Iceland Controversy: Reflections on the Transnational Market of Civic Virtue. (Gisli Palsson and Paul Rabinow).Value and Values.7. Time, Money, and Biodiversity. (Geoffrey Bowker).8. Antiretroviral Globalism, Biopolitics, and Therapeutic Citizenship. (Vinh-Kim Nguyen).9. The Last Commodity: Post-Human Ethics and the Global Traffic in "Fresh" Organs. (Nancy Scheper-Hughes).Part III: Social Technologies And Disciplines.Standards.10. Standards and Person-Making in East Central Europe. (Elizabeth Dunn).11. The Private Life of Numbers: Audit Firms and the Government of Expertise in Post-Welfare Argentina. (Andrew Lakoff).12. Implementing Empirical Knowledge in Anthropology and Islamic Accountancy. (Bill Maurer).Practices of Calculating Selves.13. Cultures of Expertise and the Management of Globalization. Toward the Re-functioning of Ethnography. (Douglas Holmes and George Marcus).14. The Discipline of Speculators. (Kate Zaloom).15. Cultures on the Brink: Re-engineering the Soul of Capitalism - on a Global Scale. (Kris Olds and Nigel Thrift).Managing Uncertainty.16. Heterarchies of Value: Distributing Intelligence and Organizing Diversity in a New Media Startup. (Monique Girard and David Stark).17. Failure as an Endpoint. (Hirokazu Miyazaki and Annelise Riles).Part IV: Governmentality And Politics.Governing Populations.18. Ecologies of Expertise. Asian Governmentality in the Knowledge Society. (Aihwa Ong).19. Globalization and Population Governance in China. (Susan Greenhalgh).20. Budgets and Biopolitics. (Stephen J. Collier).Security, Legitimacy, Justice.21. State and Urban Space in Brazil: From Modernist Planning to Democratic Interventions. (Theresa Caldeira and Jim Holston).22. The Garrison-Entrepot: A Mode of Governing in the Chad Basin. (Janet Roitman).Citizenship and Ethics.23. Biological Citizenship. (Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas).24. Robust Knowledge and Fragile Futures. (Marilyn Strathern).Index.

Worlding cities : Asian experiments and the art of being global

Abstract: List of Illustrations vii Notes on Contributors viii Series Editors Preface xiii Preface and Acknowledgments xv Introduction Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global 1 Aihwa Ong Part I Modeling 27 1 Singapore as Model: Planning Innovations, Knowledge Experts 29 Chua Beng Huat 2 Urban Modeling and Contemporary Technologies of City-Building in China: The Production of Regimes of Green Urbanisms 55 Lisa Hoffman 3 Planning Privatopolis: Representation and Contestation in the Development of Urban Integrated Mega-Projects 77 Gavin Shatkin 4 Ecological Urbanization: Calculating Value in an Age of Global Climate Change 98 Shannon May Part II Inter-Referencing 127 5 Retuning a Provincialized Middle Class in Asia's Urban Postmodern: The Case of Hong Kong 129 Helen F. Siu 6 Cracks in the Facade: Landscapes of Hope and Desire in Dubai 160 Chad Haines 7 Asia in the Mix: Urban Form and Global Mobilities Hong Kong, Vancouver, Dubai 182 Glen Lowry and Eugene McCann 8 Hyperbuilding: Spectacle, Speculation, and the Hyperspace of Sovereignty 205 Aihwa Ong Part III New Solidarities 227 9 Speculating on the Next World City 229 Michael Goldman 10 The Blockade of the World-Class City: Dialectical Images of Indian Urbanism 259 Ananya Roy 11 Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi 279 D. Asher Ghertner Conclusion Postcolonial Urbanism: Speed, Hysteria, Mass Dreams 307 Ananya Roy Index 336

The Production of Space

Abstract: ‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography

Abstract: This review surveys an emergent methodological trend in anthropological research that concerns the adaptation of long-standing modes of ethnographic practices to more complex objects of study. Ethnography moves from its conventional single-site location, contextualized by macro-constructions of a larger social order, such as the capitalist world system, to multiple sites of observation and participation that cross-cut dichotomies such as the “local” and the “global,” the “lifeworld” and the “system.” Resulting ethnographies are therefore both in and out of the world system. The anxieties to which this methodological shift gives rise are considered in terms of testing the limits of ethnography, attenuating the power of fieldwork, and losing the perspective of the subaltern. The emergence of multi-sited ethnography is located within new spheres of interdisciplinary work, including media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies broadly. Several “tracking” strategies that shape multi-site...

The New Imperialism

Abstract: 1 All about Oil 2 How America's Power Grew 3 Capital Bondage 4 Accumulation by Dispossession 5 Consent to Coercion AFTERWORD Further Reading Bibliography Notes Index

The new mobilities paradigm.

Abstract: It seems that a new paradigm is being formed within the social sciences, the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm. Some recent contributions to forming and stabilising this new paradigm include work from anthropology, cultural studies, geography, migration studies, science and technology studies, tourism and transport studies, and sociology. In this paper we draw out some characteristics, properties, and implications of this emergent paradigm, especially documenting some novel mobile theories and methods. We reflect on how far this paradigm has developed and thereby to extend and develop the ‘mobility turn’ within the social sciences.