What would it take to create a climate for supporting empirically-grounded socially impactful social science scholarship in Singapore? This is a question that has surfaced over the last five years, including generating substantive discussions in media, public sphere, and political discourse.
Analysts often point to the lack of empirically-grounded socially impactful social science scholarship in Singapore. The problem is often positioned as one related to rankings, suggesting implicitly that the drive toward rankings in Singapore-based institutions has a key role to play in the lack of social relevance of social science scholarship. The solution to this lack of socially impactful social science scholarship is often framed as the need for hiring a core of Singaporean academics that would be committed to the local context.
In this blog post, I will argue that while the drive toward rankings is indeed an impediment toward generating socially impactful scholarship in Singapore (with the emphasis on journal and citation metrics), a larger problem limits the scope of social impact that can be generated by social science scholarship in Singapore. This larger problem is the limit to academic freedom on publicly directed social science scholarship in Singapore, and the role of state bureaucracies in controlling the scope of public social science scholarship. In the rest of this essay, I will draw on a few experiences of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) in Singapore to elucidate this point.
One of the key areas of CARE's work globally and in Singapore is poverty. In this body of scholarship, by embedding the etnnographic work of our research team in an advisory group of community members experiencing poverty, the culture-centered approach seeks to co-create a research design that is anchored in the problems and solutions envisioned by those experiencing poverty. Based on a co-constructive analysis of the emergent data, the advisory group then co-creates an advocacy intervention directed at addressing the problems identified. In CARE's work with an advisory group of community members experiencing poverty, the advisory group converged on and co-created a 360-degrees advocacy campaign, Singaporeans Left Behind, with the goal of generating a conversation on poverty in Singapore. The advisory group felt that it was imminent to disrupt the silence around poverty in Singapore, simultaneously opening up spaces for conversations on hunger, food insecurity, lack of access to health care, and the inter-generational cycle of poverty.
Our research team then met with a state department to invite key stakeholders to a series of dialogues organized by the advisory group on the various aspects of challenges with poverty. After being gaslighted by senior Ministry bureaucrats about our ethnic and national identities and being lectured on the supreficiality of our research because we did not engage the Ministry before embarking on the research, we were then told that if Ministry bureaucrats would show up to the dialogue, they would need identities of the advisory group members show that the bureaucrats could check the facts on the experiences shared by the advisory group members. We noted that our research methodology, anchored in data confidentiality, did not allow for such disclosure and that was the end of the conversation.
On returning from the meeting, our team then followed up with the bureaucrats and also shared the snippet of the campaign that was to be launched as part of the advocacy.
The next day I received emails from the University administration, including forwarded emails from another Ministry, inquiring about the nature of CARE, why CARE runs campaigns, and interrogating about the academic purpose of the campaign. Moreover noting that the said Ministry did not understand why an academic center is running advocacy, I was asked, why CARE had earlier run a conference on "Communication for social change." I responded in depth to the university administration on each of these elements, as well as noted that communication for social change is a well established area within Communication Studies. I moreover noted that running social change campaigns is part of the academic work of generating empirical evidence and building theory. In other words, creating social impact through campaigns was integral to the mission of the Center, I pointed out, and the "Singaporeans Left Behind" campaign was an example of that mission.
After much negotiation, the advocacy campaign went ahead, with the only change (which was acceptable to the advisory group) being to the title of the campaign, changing it to "No Singaporeans Left Behind."
The work of CARE now came under scrutiny over the following two years. One of the questions that was considently asked through these negotiations was, "Why does an academic center run social change campaigns?" Each time that I responded, "Running social change campaigns is part of generating a theory of social change communication," the structure responded with another iteration of the same question. This was an excellent example of communicative incommensurability. It fundamentally seemed that both the university structure as well as the state structure could not comprehend that creating social impact could fundamentally be the nature of methodology directed at generating theory.
Moreover, another assertion that was often directed at me, and by extension at CARE, was that I/we did not collaborate with the relevant Ministries. To this charge I noted consistently that indeed I had reached out on multiple occasions, with the key element being that the reaching out had happened after the research had been conducted and following strategies that were identified by the advisory group. I also noted that the meta-theoretical framework of the CCA places the power and control in the hands of an advisory group comprising of community members at the margins. The decision of whether or not to engage a relevant Ministry and how to do so therefore depended on the advisory group.
The one key element this example makes visible is that the very concept of academic theorizing and methodology constructed by the state in Singapore needs to be revised for social science scholarship to be impactful. The intertwined relationship between social impact, methodology and theory needs to be updated with the times and the paradigm changes in social science. Yet another key element is the nature of state control. Socially impactful social science scholarship to be truly impactful has to be freed from the power and control of the state. Social scientists seeking to generate impact must have available to them a wide array of strategies and tactics to generate social impact. While some of these strategies might engage the state, others might not. While even among those that do engage the state, while some might be funded by the state, others might simply engage the state at a point and in a form that is meaningful to the paradigmatic commitments of the method.
Having a pluralist model of socially impactful social science scholarship that is not constrained by state diktats is vital to creating a culture of socially impactful social science in Singapore, and for that matter in any part of the world.