We are excited to announce that from today New Mandala will be collaborating with Academia.SG and it’s editors to bring you more scholarly perspectives on Singapore.

Academia.SG is an international network of Singaporean scholars aiming to promote publicly engaged scholarship about Singapore, including by encouraging debate on the systemic impediments to such engagement.

The group originally coalesced around an effort in April 2019 to represent academics’ interests in the debate over impending government legislation against online falsehoods. This experience crystallised long-held concerns about the position of academia in Singapore. These include the lack of research on Singapore; the under-representation of Singaporeans in many local university departments; and the state of academic freedom. Our primary outreach vehicle is a website, Academia.SG. We are also on Facebook and Twitter. In 2020, in line with our view that scholars have a responsibility to communicate their research beyond academia, we launched an Academic Views section publishing original commentaries and essays about Singapore.

Who we are:

Chong Ja Ian is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore. He researches international relations, especially IR theory, security, Chinese foreign policy, and international relations in the Asia-Pacific. His publications include External Intervention and the Politics of State Formation: China, Indonesia, Thailand, 1893-1952 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which received the 2013 Best Book Award from the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association.
Cherian George is Professor of Media Studies at the Hong Kong Baptist University School of Communication, where he also serves as Associate Dean for Research and Development. He studies media freedom, censorship, and hate propaganda around the world, as well as the media and politics of Singapore. His academic books include Hate Spin: The Manufacture of Religious Offense and its Threat to Democracy (MIT Press, 2016), and Media and Power in Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Linda Lim is Professor Emerita of Corporate Strategy and International Business at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the political economy of multinational and local business in Southeast Asia, as well as industrial policy, business-government and business-labor relations. Her books include Business, Government and Labor: Essays in the Economic Development of Singapore and Southeast Asia (World Scientific Publishing, 2019).
Linda Lim is Professor Emerita of Corporate Strategy and International Business at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the political economy of multinational and local business in Southeast Asia, as well as industrial policy, business-government and business-labor relations. Her books include Business, Government and Labor: Essays in the Economic Development of Singapore and Southeast Asia (World Scientific Publishing, 2019).
Teo You Yenn is Associate Professor and Provost’s Chair in Sociology at the School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She studies poverty and inequality, governance and state-society dynamics, gender, and class. She is the author of This Is What Inequality Looks Like (Ethos Books, 2018), and Neoliberal Morality in Singapore: How family policies make state and society (Routledge, 2011). She received the American Sociological Association Sex and Gender Section’s Feminist Scholar Activist Award 2016.