Teaching

AN2205 Food and Foodways (2024)

On an everyday basis, social actors purchase, prepare, and consume food as part of their gastronomic and nutritional needs. Beyond the taken for granted assumptions about food and foodways, how can we systematically analyse food and foodways through anthropological, sociological, and historical lenses? What constitutes ‘food’ and ‘non-food’? Where does ‘our’ food come from and how does food get to the table? What are the socio-political aspects of the global food system? This course interrogates the various dimensions of food in different cultures, societies, and temporalities, and unpacks the social meanings of food and food preparation in relation to such spheres of social life including gender relations, families, political economy, and the nation-state in a context of transnational connectivities and mobilities. These divergent meanings are expressed vis-a-vis issues such as the geopolitics of hunger, obesity, dieting, health, anorexia, and ecology. By evaluating these features of social life that pertain to gastronomic experiences, we assess the manner in which food (re)configures social relations among people. Throughout the course, students are encouraged to scrutinise, through the employment of theories and concepts in the social sciences, scholarly debates and research on food and foodways across historical and sociocultural milieu to better appreciate the implications of broader social structural forces that impinge on their everyday lives.

AN3207 Senses and Society (January 2025)

Sense perception and sensory practices are intricately connected to our everyday life experiences at different scales of socialities. We relate to and create environments through all of our senses and through deploying different sensory hierarchies. As anthropologist Paul Stoller has stated, we cannot comprehend the worlds of any other culture unless we get inside the sensuous operations of human bodies. Employing a range of interdisciplinary perspectives and with empirical cases drawn from the region and beyond, we explore in this module a spectrum of domains of social life including urbanity, religion, material culture, migration, tourism, and politics. We seek to scrutinise the relations and tensions between culture, identity formation, representation, and meaningmaking vis-a-vis the social life of the senses. Students are introduced to key ideas in sensory scholarship and will be equipped with analytical tools to interrogate how sensory experience lies beyond the realm of individual, physiological responses by analysing a range of sensory faculties through cross-cultural comparative approaches. Drawing upon disciplines including sociology, anthropology, and history, the course aims to critically merge theory, concepts, and examples in investigating the sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment.

SC1101E Making Sense of Society

This module introduces students to key perspectives, concepts, and findings in sociology and anthropology and how they apply to everyday life experiences. Its main objective is to motivate students to begin using these tools for analysing and understanding social structures, institutions and processes. Students are therefore encouraged to relate their own experiences in society to the discipline of sociology and anthropology. How do individuals negotiate their everyday lives in different social, temporal, and economic contexts? How do groups or communities establish norms of behaviour and systems of governance? What is the sociological imagination? What are the different sociological perspectives that can be utilised towards analysing how society works? What research methods can one employ in studying social processes and meanings? The topics covered in the module include religion; family; power and the state; social inequality (including gender and sexuality; ethnicity); and deviance and social control.

SSA1201 Singapore Society

How did Singapore as a nation come into existence? What were the antecedent events leading to her independence, and how has the country developed from the 20th to the 21st century? Taking ‘Singapore society’ as its object of scholarly inquiry, this module attempts to address and critically appraise these issues through a sociological approach by questioning how ideas and historiographies of the nation are presented, as well as how other aspects and processes of social life – culture, ethnicity, gender, class and modernisation – shape our impressions of the nation-state within the region and beyond. Students are asked to suspend their taken-for-granted or ‘local’ knowledge about Singapore in order to assess it within a larger historical, comparative, and holistic framework. Throughout the course, students will develop a critical understanding of the legacies, underlying processes, issues, problems, contradictions, and social patterns in the making of Singapore society.

SC4222 Body and Society

How can one make sense of the human body as a site of social science inquiry? What is the relation between the body and the mind, as well as the body and the larger social milieux in everyday life experiences? How can we comprehend the body as a social product culminating from a complex matrix of broader social processes and arrangements? How do theoretical and empirical analyses undertaken through the lenses of disciplinary trajectories such as sociology, anthropology, and history aid us in appraising corporealities? This course aims to deliberate upon the above queries through close examinations of both classical and contemporary theoretical paradigms running the gamut from Merleau-Ponty, Mauss, Bourdieu, Foucault, and Douglas, to Butler, Stoller, and Shilling, among others, which pertain to the body. By locating the body in different spheres of social life including personhood, gender and sexuality, ethnicity, health and medicine, commodification as well as technology, we interrogate how the human body and embodied experiences intersect with notions of knowledge, power, domination and resistance in both historical and contemporary contexts. These will be pursued through an array of select substantive issues as well as relevant films that throw light upon human bodies in different societies.

SC5770/6770 Graduate Research Seminar

The module is designed as a seminar for graduate students (who have completed at least their 1st year of graduate studies at NUS) and faculty to share their research process and development and to engage with one another critically in dialogue revolving around their ongoing research projects or dissertations. The seminar will include presentations by some faculty members (where relevant and available) on research ethics, methods of research and dissertation writing. Concurrently, this module is undertaken as a platform to help you write clearly and effectively both in an academic setting and a professional environment. We will work on this agenda by reviewing some general rules, guidelines, and suggestions on research and writing, and most importantly, by learning to embark on peer editing and constructive critique and feedback on one another’s work. Each student is required to formally present twice on their research and writing. Active participation in all discussions is expected so as to both provide peer feedback and to engage with developing question/answer techniques. Although there are no required books for this course, there are substantial readings and some books that you might find helpful, which are listed below. Depending on interest and relevance, there may be occasional articles that we will read and critically engage with over the course of the semester.

CSA6102 Cultural Studies in Asia

Sense perception and sensory practices are intricately connected to the history of the body and emotions. We relate to and create environments through all of our senses and through deploying different sensory hierarchies. As anthropologist Paul Stoller has stated, we cannot comprehend the worlds of any other culture unless we get inside the sensuous operations of human bodies. In exercising what Stoller calls epistemological humility, we explore in this module through interdisciplinary lenses, a range of domains of social life including urbanity, religion, material culture, migration, tourism, and animal-human relations. Employing critical and interdisciplinary perspectives and toolkits, we seek to scrutinise the relations and tensions between culture, identity formation, representation, and meaning- making. Drawing upon disciplines including sociology, anthropology, and history, the course investigates the sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment, and aims to critically merge theory, concepts, and examples drawn from case studies around Asia. At the same time, we deliberate on both intra- and inter-regional cross-cultural encounters in order to evaluate possibilities of comparison within the region and beyond.