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| Poster of the No Singaporeans Left Behind documentary I had directed |
While working in Singapore for six years, what was most powerfully evident to me was the capacity of the authoritarian state to continually deploy communicative inversions. Communicative inversions are symbolic resources that turn materiality on its head.
I crystallized much of my thinking on communicative inversion while working in Singapore, witnessing the academy as an extension of the state continually play this game of communicative inversions.
Even as I was being continually called into meetings with management regarding the work of my research team at the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) with migrant workers and with households experiencing poverty, I would be lectured by the management on how these meetings were really meant as friendly guidance.
When questioned about the attacks on my academic freedom, management would offer me polite stories about how my academic freedom was not really being threatened. It was just polite guidance to help me do my research better!
These communicative inversions around academic freedom were particularly salient given the management's outright reassurances to me regarding the freedom of my research team to pursue our research agenda on poverty and worker rights in the almost one year I spent negotiating the job over.
Even as I experienced various techniques of harassment for doing the work on poverty, the messages were framed as friendly advice, guidance, and facilitation. During and after one such meeting, it was communicated to me that I was not collaboratively working with the relevant Ministries even though the Ministries had reached out to me.
It didn't really matter that I had no written documentation of Ministries reaching out to collaborate, except one senior staff at a Ministry sending out emails to other senior staff in that and related Ministries about an underlying agenda of our research team because we were running a campaign.
Early career researchers who continued the work of the culture-centered approach (CCA) were asked to turn in their syllabi for review, were targeted with smear campaigns, and were derided for running campaigns. One of these early career researchers reached out to me asking for advice, letting me know that a senior scholar smirked at them, stating social justice and campaigns are not really the work of an academic center.
Fast forward six years, the Sustainable Development Goals have been further crystallized through rankings measuring Universities. The QS group that runs various rankings has now crafted rankings for SDGs. Asian universities chasing these rankings have also quickly shifted their game, now talking sustainability, social justice, and human rights. The language of social justice has started proliferating, offering various Asian twists around justice and human rights.
It is important that we read such twists and turns, framed as various forms of Asian-ness critically. In authoritarian climates where repression is perfected through communicative inversions, the turn to social justice is a performance, one that writes over, obfuscates, and erases multiple registers of oppression. Just ask these Asian scholars laying claims to social justice for receipts of public works and public statements on the deep injustices we witness within Asian authoritarianisms. In Singapore for instance, ask these scholars about their track records of public statements on the plight of migrant workers experiencing deep exploitation.
In the absence of any public record, the talk of social justice is a shiny facade. One that upholds and perpetuates extreme neoliberalism, punctuated as Asian difference.