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AbstractThis paper explores how the (trans)nationalization of Islam can lead to differential understandings of the Muslim subject and secular citizen in Singapore. (Trans)nationalization problematizes the state‐led regulation of religion by revealing the complexities that emerge when religious subject positions are indexed to citizenship status. Islamic expression is closely regulated in Singapore, meaning the Singaporean Muslim subject is framed by the state in secular‐first terms. Complicating this framing is the presence of Bangladeshi migrant workers, who, by virtue of their visa and residency statuses, are viewed as transient members of society and denied access to citizenship. Non‐citizenship causes a variety of Islamic expressions to become viable pathways to religious subject formation, including those associated with Islamic missionary movement, Tablighi Jamaat. By claiming these subject positions, Bangladeshi Tablighis become vectors through which Singapore's Muslim spaces are exposed to transnational Islamic influences, causing the mosque to be imbued with divergent, and sometimes contested, meanings and attributions of value.

This article argues that the motivations for investing money in gacha games can be a function of the affective embedding of players within the game, and the game within broader circuits of cultural affinity and appeal. While research on gacha games – and the specific role of loot boxes therein – has emphasised their associations with gambling, I contend that affect is another trigger that can motivate seemingly irrational playing behaviours. The affective embeddings of gacha games motivate players to curate aesthetic assemblages of virtual content that enable the mediated expression of the self. Drawing on qualitative data generated among young Singapore-based players of gacha games, I explore how the acquisition of characters, skins and collections can be motivated by the emotional payoff that comes from relationality rather than gambling.

This paper advances a new understanding of cosmopolitanism; one that is rooted in the affective potential of the body. It argues that whilst the self is often projected onto the body, so too can the body play an important role in (re)imagining the self. As such, the body can decolonise the self from the mind, from the expectations of society and culture, and from the normative epistemological underpinnings of academic knowledge production. I validate these theoretical arguments through an empirical focus on the practice of dancehall in Singapore. Dancehall is an emancipatory cultural movement that emerged in Jamaica in the late‐1970s, and, amongst other things, has become known for its sexually provocative representation of the human body. Singapore, on the other hand, is a conservative Asian city‐state in which cosmopolitan self‐fashioning is an elite, top‐down process imparted by the government and educational system. By reconciling dancehall culture in/and the Singapore context, I explore how Singaporean youths forge new, more affective, forms of cosmopolitan self‐realisation. Through dancehall, they learn how to engage with the self on their own terms, and thus realise new ways of being in the world.

This paper explores how the playing of Pokémon Go can cause power to be assembled, and team-based expressions of territoriality to manifest. By playing the game, players become embedded within digital assemblages of power, which they reproduce through their interactions with other players, game features, and public spaces. When digital assets—such as gyms—are indexed to public spaces, players work together in teams to compete for digital ownership, and control, of these assets. In turn, this leads to the forging of a team-based sense of territoriality that is pervasive, and maximized by consolidating the power of the assemblage. Qualitative data are presented to empirically explore how playing Pokémon Go in Singapore can encourage players to forge a team-based sense of territoriality, which in turn results in the (dis)assembling of power. To conclude, I call for closer consideration of the implications of digital assemblages of power for everyday life.

Digital technologies play an increasingly prominent role in the reproduction of society and space. Rather than being studied as a separate category of understanding, the ways in which such technologies intersect with and inflect upon the real world has provided a recent focus of research. Urban music is inherently spatial, but the ways in which digital technologies have enabled artists to resist injustice, to reproduce space and to reclaim the right to the city has not yet been considered. This article fills the lacuna by exploring how grime artists harness digital technologies to resist marginalization by the mainstream and create new expressions of power. Specifically, it shows how digital enablers have led to the democratization of music, which in turn has empowered grime artists to reclaim the right to represent the spaces of the inner city, and, in doing so, to challenge and subvert more wide-ranging structures of power and inequality. Accordingly, I argue that grime is more than music and is as much a channel of social activism as it is creative expression.

This paper expands the notion of sacred space within the geographies of religion by arguing that spaces of religious praxis need to be understood in relation to the broader spatial logics within which they are embedded. Given that the spatial logics of urban environments tend to be secular and neoliberal in nature, it considers how religious groups respond to the realities of the marketplaces in which they operate by forging "alternatively sacred" spaces. These spaces augment the appeal of religious groups in non-religious ways, thus making them more competitive players in a religious marketplace. Specifically, it explores how independent churches in Singapore create alternatively sacred spaces that are used for religious purposes, although their appeal and affective value do not accord with more traditional understandings of how sacred spaces should look, feel, or otherwise be engaged with. These spaces are designed to appeal to younger people, and to draw non-Christians to Christian spaces, and Christians to alternatively religious spaces. The extent to which they appeal to these groups provides insight into reimagination of religion under market conditions, spatial politics of value, and ideological fissures between different Christian communities.

Experimental Practice is one of the latest incarnations of Duke University Press's 36-part 'Experimental Futures' book series; a series that intends to question, to provoke, and to provide an innovative theoretical starting point for a radical reimagination of the contemporary world and its unfolding futures. From the outset, then, Experimental Practice is positioned as a challenge to preconceived ideas of social, political and economic structures and justices. Materiality and matter provide the theoretical groundings from which this challenge is launched. Through them, Papadopoulos articulates a new understanding of the interdependencies of the human and nonhuman worlds. Through them, he also develops an understanding of 'alternative ontologies'; or, as he puts it, 'alterontologies', of everyday life. These alterontologies guide his critical exploration of normative techniques of knowledge production, and of everyday socio-political practices. Perhaps as a stylistic rejection of such normativity, Experimental Practice is a self-professed work of 'social science fiction' that switches between the poetic and the scholarly in a coherent and evocative way. An example of this can be found in the closing two sentences of the Introduction (p. 10), which state:Something else, something existential is at stake here: alterontological politics is a possible way to survive a world that is disintegrating through human action. Alterontologies may be a way to escape humanity.