Suchergebnisse

In this article, I begin with the position that knowledge production and reproduction is partial and situated. Through an examination of academic research on and teaching of religion in Singapore, I demonstrate how scholarly interventions at once re-present and conceal religion as experienced and lived. I posit that the partiality of such interventions is due to the influential official narrative about religion in Singapore, so that what is studied and taught reflects certain dimensions of religious life and religious-secular relations that dominate official discourse. In particular, through academic writing (and to a lesser extent, teaching), religion in Singapore is constructed as a particular mosaic of social, cultural, and political life, socially relevant, culturally rich, spatially manifested, transnationally linked, politically delicate, and historically steeped. Drawing from this reflection on Singapore, I emphasize the need to recognize the geography, sociology, and politics of knowledge (re)production, and to decenter the notion that there is an emerging "Asian religious studies."

Geographies of education have drawn more research attention in the last decade. The varied motivations for geographical attention to education have led to divergent approaches. First, a macro, political economy or "outward looking" approach has examined educational provision and what it tells us about wider social, economic and political processes. Second, a micro, social-cultural or "inward looking" approach has emphasised social difference within school spaces, and the links between home and educational spaces. This latter approach has also acknowledged the importance of the voices of children and young people in understanding educational experiences. In this paper, l take stock of existing research in the geographies of education and then make a case for the examination of two types of schools that have received little or no geographical attention thus far, namely international schools and faith-based schools. I propose a multi-scalar framework for analysing the former and a relational framework for understanding the latter.

The important place of the oftentimes "hidden" independent worker, or freelancer, has been acknowledged in developed countries where the creative economy has grown. These creative workers do not belong to the traditional employment set-up organized around firms. Instead, they move from portfolio to portfolio, assignment to assignment, interspersing corporation-based jobs with periods of self employment. Their work offers freedom, independence and creative space, but has also been characterized as precarious, because the securities of old working patterns no longer hold. While governments in many countries and cities have become attracted to the potential of the creative economy, those that have a strong tradition of economic planning, such as Singapore, will also have to come to grips with a new creative economy in which there exists a great deal more amorphousness and a hidden ecology. In this paper, I examine how the growth of "precarious labor" entails three shifts that the Singapore government is attempting to make in the face of a more "precarious economy": new methods in mapping and measurement, new directions in education and training, and new experiments in labor organization and management.

The important nexus between culture and economy is by no means a recent development nor a novel inclusion on the social science agenda. As Harvey pointed out in his foreword to Zukin's (1988)Loft Living, the artist, as one `representative' of the cultural class, has always shared a position in the market system, whether as artisans or as "cultural producers working to the command of hegemonic class interest". In the last two to three decades, in the US and more lately, in western Europe, cultural activities have become increasingly significant in the economic regeneration strategies in many cities. Geographers, however, have been slow to analyse this integration of the cultural and economic in explicit terms, and it is only in recent years that a reworked cultural geography (Cosgrove and Jackson, 1987; Kong, 1997) and a "new" economic geography (Thrift and Olds, 1996) has considered the constitutive role played by culture in economic development and the way in which economic forces are in fact culturally encoded (see Ley, 1996 and the other papers in the special issue of Urban Geography, 1996). Often, this relationship between the cultural and economic is facilitated, enhanced or hampered by policy. Yet, as in the idealist tradition, many more state cultural policies have been based on the notion of culture as a realm separate from, and often in opposition to, the realm of material production and economic activity than is explicitly acknowledged (Shuker, 1994, p. 54).

Global cities are characterized by the multiplicity of flows that they are implicated in - flows of people, goods, services, ideas, and images. Yet, global cities do not derive their status only on the basis that they are networked nodes. They also require particular forms of cultural capital. Cities with global aspirations have thus increasingly recognized the need to accumulate cultural capital, for which one means is to create new urban spaces, in particular, new cultural urban spaces (e.g. grand theatres, museums, libraries). These often monumental structures are intended to support a vibrant cultural life, in order to attract and sustain global human and economic flows. In this paper, I examine the efforts by Shanghai's, Singapore's and Hong Kong's governments to develop cultural icons as part of the strategy to help their cities gain global city status, and in the process, constructing shared national and city identities. I illustrate how such efforts are not universally interpreted in the manner intended, with city populations sometimes protesting, sometimes simply oblivious. At the same time, I argue that such strategies to achieve global city status are sometimes at odds with projects of nationhood.

Unlike the other papers in this symposium, which deal with countries where there are large numbers of universities, and comparison can be made over time and across space of geography's place in higher education, this paper focuses on a country that was for a long time described as a 'one-university town': Singapore. What interesting story call there be when geography's presence in higher education is so circumscribed? In this paper, the author illustrates how geography's,fate in higher education in Singapore is closely bound up with developments in other parts of the world, not unlike the way in which the country's destiny is integrally linked with global economic, social and political developments. Yet, geography in higher education in Singapore has also managed to maintain a trajectory of growth and significance, problems in many other places notwithstanding. It has also maintained all identity in uenced by developments elsewhere, yet simultaneously unique. In what follows, the author outlines the presence and complexion of geography in Singapore's higher education landscape, and the interlocking relationships with pre-tertiary geography education, international flows, internal university relations, and geography in the public imagination, all of which shape the character of geography in Singapore's higher education.