Advisor: Dr Ooi Giok Ling
Dr Ooi Giok Ling is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies. Her area of interests includes management of ethnic relations and the environment. She holds a Ph.D. from the Australian National University.
Chair: Chang Li Lin
Chang Li Lin is currently a 2nd year Ph.D. Candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. In the meantime, she is attached to the Institute of Policy Studies, Singapore for her fieldwork. Her area of interests are economic interdependence and foreign policy of the Southeast Asian region and anything else that is interesting. She holds a BA (Hons) in International Relations and Sociology and an MA in International Relations.
Secretary: Tan Chong Kee
Chong Kee's primary research interest is the interaction of the political, economic and cultural systems with creative writing in contemporary China. He is also interested in the contemporary development of Asian societies, esp those of Mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore. Chong Kee has written a book on the interplay of politics and traditional culture in the 'Xungen' (root searching) movement in China, published some short stories in Chinese and Esperanto, and is now very glad that he is studying in the West Coast, not East.
Panelists: (Listed in the order their bio reached us)
James Gomez is a second year PhD candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His thesis is on politics and national identity construction in Singapore. He is currently berthed at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies for field work. His main research interests are nationalism, culture, ethnicity, identity and rights. He holds a B.Soc. Sci. (Hons) in Political Science (NUS) and an MA in Ideology and Discourse Analysis (University of Essex).
Lay Hwee is a Research Associate at The Institute of Policy Studies (IPS). Prior to joining the IPS, she had worked as a Research Officer in the Ministry of Defence, and then for the Ministry of Information and the Arts as an Information Officer. From 1992 - 1994, she was in the University of Macau teaching subjects on Government and Public Administration. She hold a Master's degree in Political Science from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
Her current research interest in the Institute is on ASEAN's external relations. Sheis also personally very interested in the current debate on Asian and Western values.
JB Bungar is currently engaged as a writer/editor and is one of five founder-editors of SIREN, Singapore's only Feminist magazine. Her primary research interests include Health, fitness, sexuality, fertility, medicine, with a specific focus on the new reproductive technologies, AIDS, notions of the body, and the surrounding politics, population, space --both inner and outer -- the media (naturally), development and anything pertaining to what is commonly and erroneously referred to as women's issues (erroneously because women constitute half the species and since both men and women are inexplicably linked, what concerns the one, concerns the other) There are a number of other eclectic secondary interests but she will not bore you to death with these. She is also notorious for her poor typing skills and wishes to apologize for this at the outset and asks for your leniency. She assures you that this failing is more than compensated for by her diverse talents in other areas. At the moment, she is based in Singapore.
Simon SC Tay is a writer and lawyer. He has written 3 books of stories and poetry, and was a winner of the 1995 Young Artist of the Year award. He practised law for a number of years before becoming the first Coordinator for the Singapore Volunteers Overseas at the Singapore International Foundation. In 1993, he left Singapore for further studies, winning the 1994 Harvard Law School Laylin Prize for international law. He now teaches Constitutional law and international law at the NUS Faculty of Law, focusing on environment and human rights. His work includes questions of culture and of equality. He was previously a visiting fellow at Cultural Survival, an American NGO for indigenous and ethnic rights.
As a debate about race is often a question of who you are and how you perceive things, he would like to say that he is a Peranakan Singaporean, who first spoke Malay as a child to his amah, before learning English from his parents.
Joanne Tang is a graduate student in the Comparative Literature Department at Rutgers University (NJ). She specialises in colonial-postcolonial theory, poststructuralism, feminist theory and other topics related to subalternity. She is terribly cynical about things like multiculturalism; the key words that are in my mind are: knowledge and power, issues that are greatly undermined and understated in discussions. And few people take into consideration the role of capitalism in structuring or strengthening frameworks of hegemony.
Edmund is a political science student trying to complete a Ph.D, while pretending to be doing research on International Oceans Policy at the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre. He has a strong interest in South East Asia, particularly on strategic issues, and on Australian politics. His personal ideological position is undecided, and has moved from end to end of the political spectrum depending on the year. He has an undying affection for roast lamb, roast duck, and KFC. He is a huge fan of computer games, RPGs, and Sci Fi and Fantasy, especially Star Trek.