Projects
Illiberal media production in Singapore
This ethnographic project examines authoritarian resilience in Singapore's media production, culminating in the book Performing Fear in Television Production: Practices of an Illiberal democracy, published by Amsterdam University Press in 2022. Based on a production ethnography of Singaporean television, it raises questions about how far the audience has become a surrogate for but also exceeds the illiberal state in the ‘post-public sphere’. The book encourages readers to rethink contemporary media governmentality in conversation with global trends towards anti-fandom, public policing and surveillance culture, exploring how ‘post-public’ social imaginaries emerging among state and media practices may be remaking the terms of authoritarian media production.
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Media geopolitics on the margins of the Sinosphere
This developing project explores the implications of the bifurcation of media globalisation for Southeast Asia's media industries in the age of competing global hegemonies. In particular, I am interested in how media workers liminal to the ‘two globalisations’ carve out spaces for creative insubordination and engagement, and how these pluralize the frameworks we use to think about media work and labour.
Dewesternizing media censorship and freedom
Whether in legacy or digital media, our imaginations of media censorship and freedom continue to based on early enlightenment conceptualisations of civil society, the state and the rational citizen subject. I have published several pieces of work that problematize imposing Western ideas of civil society on non-Western contexts and that propose new frameworks that de-Westernize how we study censorship.
Theorising Imagined Audiences
I have an ongoing interest in how we can theorize about the role of imagined audiences in media production beyond the dominant conceptualizations that are based on western contexts. I've conceptualized imagined audiences as 'affective superaddressee' in illiberal democracies; as well as a 'palimpsest of audience imaginaries' in the age of generative AI.
Singapore New Wave cinema
Together with my collaborator, Dr How Wee Ng, I have edited a special issue and several articles rethinking traditional definitions of Singapore New Wave cinema.
Asian Media Industries Research Network
To facilitate inter-Asian dialogue around Asian media industries and media work, I co-founded the Asian Media Industries Research Network with Dr. Pei Sze Chow, a collaboration between King’s College London and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
More information can be found on https://mediaindustries.asia/.
