Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 

About: Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography is an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Population & Land use. It has an ISSN identifier of 0129-7619. Over the lifetime, 1027 publications have been published receiving 16288 citations.

Development and governmentality

Abstract: The subjectivity of individuals, the so-called speakers and hearers of political discourse, who actually, or even ideally, populate a state, needs to be understood in terms of enunciative modalities - the statuses, sites, and positions - of their existence as political subjects. Enunciative modalities refer to the ways a discursive practice is attached to bodies in space (Clifford, 2001:56).Governmental thought territorializes itself in different ways… We can analyze the ways in which the idea of a territorially bounded, politically governed nation state under sovereign authority took shape… One can trace anomalous governmental histories of smaller-scale territories… and one can also think of these [as] spaces of enclosure that governmental thought has imagined and penetrated… how [does it] happen that social thought territorializes itself on the problem of [for example] the slum in the nineteenth century (Rose, 1999:34–36)?

Surplus possibilities: postdevelopment and community economies

Abstract: In recent years, development practitioners, anthropologists, geographers and others who are observers ‘on the ground’ of the failures of the one-size-fits-all model of development have begun to generate a ‘post-development’ discourse (Rahnema with Bawtree, 1997). By this, we mean a set of thinking and doing practices that are guided by a distinctive ethical stance. Post-development discourse is aligned with the long leftist tradition of critical analyses that accompanied the global consolidation, immediately after the Second World War, of a hegemonic mainstream development project. But while sharing a dissatisfaction with mainstream development, this emerging post-development discourse effects a radical rupture with a style of thinking that underpins much of the critique of development. In this chapter, we aim to give a taste of how we are broaching the practice of post-development thinking in a linked set of projects – a language project of representing the economy as diverse, a collaboration with an NGO that is involved in what we see as post-development interventions in the global trade in labour and an action research project negotiating postdevelopment pathways in place in a Philippines municipality.

Postcolonialising Geography: Tactics and Pitfalls

Abstract: The moves within postcolonial theory to "provincialise Europe" encourage an acknowledgement of the parochial nature of much of what still passes for universal theory in the western academy. Within geography, postcolonialism has generated a strong interest in colonial histories and contemporary postcolonial politics, but this has not displaced the dominant parochial forms of theorising in the discipline. The paper argues for a more cosmopolitan theoretical project within geography, one whose routes through a range of intellectual traditions and contexts might encourage a broader scope to conversations about space and nature, and produce more lively and creative insights into some of the urgent political issues facing the world today. A geography whose intellectual vision is limited to the concerns and perspectives of the richest countries in the world has little hope of effectively participating in the debates that will matter in the twenty-first century. Within the frame of this long-term intellectual project, this paper will suggest some initial practical steps which researchers, writers, teachers and students in geography might take to start to decentre the predominant Euro-Americanism of the discipline. The specific sources of inspiration for this argument are drawn from comparative urbanism and Southern African geography.

When the light of the home is abroad: unskilled female migration and the Filipino family.

Abstract: The migration of women engaged in transnational domestic work reveals how the uneven impacts of globalisation have intruded into the micro-world of families and households. In this age of globalisation and migration family membership has become multisited or transnational with members dispersed in space. The migration of workers and the separation this entails has raised challenges to notions and ideals of "being family". Unlike other workers on the move the migration of domestic workers has some distinctive characteristics. It can be framed in terms of women moving between families and households; workers whose departure from their family of origin and insertion into their family of employment reconstitute the structure and content of family relationships in both material and imagined ways. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted in the Philippines and Singapore we explore how migrant women and their family members define and negotiate family ideals gender identities and family relationships given the familys transnational configuration. Our findings provide some support to the notion that individual members in transnational families resort to "relativising" in fashioning responses to their situation. (authors)