Book Review: Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers

Women in Motion: Globalization, State Policies, and Labor Migration in Asia

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Migration governance and the migration industry in Asia: moving domestic workers from Indonesia to Singapore

Gender, Technology and Development

The Marxist roots of critical methodology envision method as anchor to an emancipatory politics that seeks structural transformation. Drawing on our negotiations of carrying out culture-centered health communication projects amidst neoliberal authoritarianism, we explore the nature of academic-activist-community collaborations in envisioning democratic infrastructures for socialist organizing of health. Method is thus inverted from the hegemonic structures of Whiteness that construct extractive relationships perpetuating existing and entrenched health inequities to partnerships of solidarity with subaltern communities committed to a politics of “placing the body on the line.” We work through the concept of “placing the body on the line” to depict the ways in which the body of the academic, turned vulnerable and weaponized in active resistance to neocolonial/capitalist structures, disrupts the hegemonic logics of power and control that shape health within these structures. Examples of culture-centered projects at the global margins offer conceptual bases for theorizing embodied practice as resistance to state-market structures that produce health injustices. The body of the academic as a methodological site decolonizes the capitalist framework of knowledge production through its voicing of an openly resistive politics that stands in defiance to the neoliberal structures that produce health inequities. We challenge the communication literature on micro-practices of resistance, interrogating concepts such as “strategic ambiguity,” “pragmatic interventionism” and “practical engagement” to offer method as embodied practice of open/public resistance, as direct antagonism to state-market structures. Through the re-working of method as embodied resistance that is explicitly socialist in its commitment to imagining health, culture-centered interventions imagine and practice Marxist advocacy and activist interventions that disrupt the intertwined hegemonic logics of capital and empire.

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Critical Health Communication Method as Embodied Practice of Resistance: Culturally Centering Structural Transformation through Struggle for Voice

While there has been much debate on Singapore’s migration policies, a ‘black box’ continues to surround policymaking decisions. This article examines the dynamics of migration policy reforms in Sin...

Drivers of migration policy reform: The day off policy for migrant domestic workers in Singapore:

Cultural Mediation Through Vernacularization: Framing Rights Claims Through the Day-Off Campaign for Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore

In this paper we consider four factors that shaped the development of migration policy intended to protect the rights of vulnerable migrant women. They are: the role players in the policy change process, the debates that shaped the policy change, the role that research played and the political context in which the policy change took place. Based on case studies from Bangladesh, South Africa, and Singapore, we trace the drivers of policy change in these contexts and how the gendered vulnerability of the intended beneficiaries impacted the policy process. Our research showed that policy development is shaped by complex socio-political conditions. Understanding these conditions can help to make policy change advocacy more effective and contextually relevant.

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Chiu Yee Koh

Papers

Drivers of migration policy reform: The day off policy for migrant domestic workers in Singapore:

Cultural Mediation Through Vernacularization: Framing Rights Claims Through the Day-Off Campaign for Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore

How Unpopular Policies are Made: Examples from South Africa, Singapore and Bangladesh

The Dynamics of Policy Formulation and Implementation: A Case Study of Singapore’s Mandatory Weekly Day off Policy for Migrant Domestic Workers