Research
The Singaporean Stack: cashless payment, digital infrastructure, and smart citizenship
This research project examines how novel digital infrastructures contribute to and complicate community-making and senses of belonging within and beyond the state’s territorial boundaries. The Singaporean state has long been intimately involved in fostering and developing domestic digital infrastructures such as PayNow. These governmental and financial infrastructures serve a dual role: while keeping Singapore at the forefront of global technological competition, within the state’s borders they facilitate everyday economic flows. In Singapore’s iconic hawker centres, the use of SGQR for payment symbolizes the harmonious flow from Singapore’s communal past towards its future development. Yet the rapid proliferation of digital finance infrastructure does not always go according to plan: for some, the ‘frictionless’ flows are unexpectedly turbulent, and ‘transparent’ interfaces are turn out to be strikingly impermeable. What emerges is a new geography, or topology, of enclosure and exclusion.
This geography is entangled across multiple scales and fields of study: not simply the ‘smart city’ but the Smart Nation(-state), assembled from a mosaic of regional as well as national platforms and state actors cooperating and competing across a fractured landscape. This project seeks to examine how these different scales—the global competition for capital and prestige, the nation-state governed for and by the society of a particular place, and also the uneven regional landscape—fit together. How do state-backed platforms bound territories without binding its citizens? How does Singapore delineate its community without limiting its economic reach?
Peopling Infrastructure
Beijing Daxing Airport. STR/AFP/Getty Images
Mobility is not solely the product of material infrastructure, but the product of labor coordinated across vast distances by both passengers and workers. The arrival of automation, in the form of self-service check-in kiosks and boarding gates, has radically reworked the distribution of this labor in airports. As a Research Fellow on the “Peopling Infrastructure” research project led by Dr. Lin Weiqiang, I investigated how workers at Beijing’s brand-new Daxing Airport and the older Beijing Capital Airport are handling these changes. Rather than serving as a sort of human interface for the computerized back-end of airport infrastructure, agents step to the side and work to regulate the work of passengers and handle the various problems that inevitably arise. This redistribution of airport labor reworks assumptions about passenger work as well: passenger autonomy comes at the cost of increased expectations of digital savvy, and less forgiveness for those who lack it. While automation shows no signs of replacing human labor, the process of automation is dramatically organizing the work that people do, redistributing benefit and blame between workers, machines, and passengers.
Navigating Chinese-ness
Guangzhou Station, 2017, during the Spring Festival rush.
My dissertation analyzes rail infrastructure as key site for the production of nation-ness: the sense of national community which coalesces through the skilled practices of everyday life. Supported by the Foreign Languages and Area Studies Fellowship and the NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, I drew on multi-sited and infrastructural ethnographic methodologies to investigate how passengers navigate and inhabit the built environment of rail stations and carriages. I used materialist and affective theory to analyze how the more-than-human elements of rail space and the practices of passengers and personnel are co-constituted. Traveling as a rail passenger was a form of “legitimate peripheral participation” through which I observed the entanglement of rail travel practice and nation-ness. I traveled extensively throughout the Chinese rail system: east to near North Korea, west to the Kazakh border, south to the South China Sea, and north to the Russian border, as well as traveling repeatedly along selected lines. This first-hand experience informed interviews conducted with rail passengers from a range of ages, regions, and socio-economic backgrounds. This fieldwork showed the centrality of changing ticketing and identification procedures in shaping passenger practice, which informed the second phase of research, in which I analyzed the role of ticketing and identification in media narratives concerning the 2018 opening of the Express Railway Link between Guangzhou and Hong Kong.
My findings detail how rail travel has homogenized China’s diverse regions—and also how it has produced new fractures. Thanks to country-wide information technology networks and rail infrastructure, a passenger with just an identification card and a smartphone can travel frictionlessly throughout China, realizing space and community at the scale of the nation. Even as rail homogenizes, however, it also creates new divides: my work found that a two-tiered system is emerging which mirrors, roughly, a divided ridership: poor migrant workers depend on the cheaper conventional services, while the better off tend towards the speed and comfort of high speed rail (HSR). This bifurcation is incomplete, and I found that within a single carriage different passengers often use distinct traveling practices. Yet what constitutes “proper” behavior on the rail is increasingly subject to public education campaigns and a cause of intra-passenger conflict: the bifurcation emerges through infrastructure and through passenger practice.
Other lines of inquiry
A driver presents a QR health code to be scanned during a temperature check. Collected from Zhihu.com
Materializing space
Materiality—the stubborn, excessive, forcefulness of things—has been a developing strand of geographic theory for several decades. Materialist ontologies have helped theorists grapple with the agency of non-human things, rethink the existence of more-than-human social assemblages and re-engage with the body. An aspect of materiality that has yet to be grappled with, however, is the relation between materiality and space itself. Working from an alternative ontological genealogy, from Lucretius to Marx and beyond, this project seeks to theorize how materiality and space are mutually co-constitutive, as well as illuminating the imbrication of fact and possibility, is-ness and meaning.
A world map, reconstructed in computer strategy game Sid Meier’s Civilization 5.
Critical geopolitics of games
Investigating the intersection of embodied practice and geopolitical abstraction from a different vantage, the critical analysis of strategy games asks what it means to play at empire. Simultaneously an elite practice of diplomats and generals and a popular pastime for hobbyists, strategy gaming puts players in the role of the state, “seeing” from above and pursuing the high modernist dream of absolute control. What can these games tell us about popular understandings of the state and global realpolitik? What can games tell us about how embodied individuals learn the art of seeing “from nowhere?”