Human Trafficking in Southeast Asia reflections by Felicia Choo

When I first saw that NUS was offering a module on human trafficking, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Human trafficking was something that I had only read about in the newspapers on seen on TV; I wanted to learn more about it so I could help to combat trafficking in the future. Specifically, I was most interested in sex trafficking, since I feel strongly about women’s causes.

Going on the fieldtrip to Cambodia and Thailand and having dialogues as a class with various anti-trafficking and sex workers’ rights organisations was an eye-opener. By the end of the module, I realised that the problem of trafficking was even bigger than I thought and it remained open to debate whether local government or foreign intervention is more effective. Yet in my mind, there was still one issue that remained unresolved:

Is prostitution inherently wrong and degrading?

Somaly Mam, famed survivor of sex trafficking, and who currently runs several anti-sex trafficking organisations, would have you think so. I certainly agreed, before I met with The Women’s Network for Unity and Empower Foundation. These two organisations champion sex workers’ rights, a contentious issue in their home countries of Cambodia and Thailand, respectively. They provide support – monetary and emotional – to female and transgendered sex workers. Some of these people had been victims of sex trafficking.

It was impossible not to be affected as I listened to sex workers talk about how the money they earned from their profession provided them, and sometimes their families, with a living. Or when one transgendered sex worker (from The Women’s Network for Unity) spoke of transgendered people commonly being ostracized by society, and how she herself had been cast out from her family and chose prostitution to survive.

While sex workers acknowledged that sex work would not have been their first choice of job, they insisted on wanting to be respected. Empower’s sex workers manage and work in their own bar, called the Can Do Bar. From a sociology student’s point of view, I thought it was great that in a profession where women are commonly seen to be the exploited, submissive victims of men, men’s power had been subverted and these women were now in charge of their work, and to a greater extent, their lives.

I still think that prostitution should be discouraged, especially forced prostitution. But I have definitely come to respect these sex workers for their will to survive and succeed on their own terms.

Lecturer Dr Kevin McGahan (centre, in white shirt) and his class on the fieldtrip. Felicia stands beside him on his right.

 

The Prince Meets the Lion

The NUS FASS Graduate Studies Division hosted academics and graduate students from the Prince of Songkla University (PSU) last Wednesday, 23 October 2013. Associate Professor Shirlena Huang, Vice Dean (Graduate Studies) and Associate Professor Bruce Lockhart, Assistant Dean (Graduate Studies) warmly welcomed the delegation which hailed from PSU’s Pattani Campus, Thailand. The faculty members and students from PSU were largely from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.

A/P Huang and A/P Lockhart greeted the visitors and went on to give an overview on the FASS Graduate Studies Programme, with the latter conversing in both English and Thai. The presentation was followed by a question-and-answer session between A/P Huang and A/P Lockhart and the Thai guests. A group of NUS graduate students from the Departments of Geography, History and Southeast Asian Studies whose theses were related to Thailand (and could speak Thai, too!) joined soon after, to mingle with the Thai visitors. While the PSU students were shy and did not raise many questions during the question-and-answer session previously, they were chatty and excited to interact with the NUS students.

At the end of the two-hour session, an academic representative from PSU presented a token of appreciation to A/P Huang. The meeting was rounded up by a flurry of warm goodbyes and an onslaught of digital and handphone cameras flashing everywhere, as both PSU and NUS representatives attempted to capture the precious new memories that were created together.

 Students from NUS and PSU interacting over tea

Students from NUS and PSU interacting over tea

A/P Huang receiving a token of appreciation from a PSU representative

A group photo for remembrance!

Thomson Reuters Journalism Programme

Dear Students,

Reuters is looking for recent graduates or soon-to-graduate students for its highly competitive journalism program. The program, which operates out of London, New York and Singapore, seeks to place highly driven individuals who are interested in a career as a reporter with Reuters.

The program offers new journalists the chance of a career with Reuters while earning an attractive salary and company benefits. Trainees for for Reuters Asia will work on reporting teams in Asia – placement will be based on language expertise and business needs. You will be coached by some of our best journalists in order to hit the ground running—reporting and delivering news stories to exacting Thomson Reuters standards.

Trainees who excel during the nine-month program will earn the opportunity to move into staff positions in one of our 200 newsrooms around the world, subject to business needs and language skills, with the help of a mentor to guide their early careers.

More details about the can be found at the URL below:

http://careers.thomsonreuters.com/Students/Bachelors/Europe/Reuters-Journalism-Program/

Additionally, Reuters will be dispatching 3 of their own staff to meet with you and talk about the programme. They are:

– Sarah Edmonds, General Manager Southeast Asia/Pacific & Global Pictures
– Darren Schuettler, Asia Editorial Training Manager
– Sebastian Tong, Asia Editorial Financial Training Editor

The details of the events are:

Date: 6th Nov 2013 (Wed.)
Time: 3:00 – 5:30pm
Venue: CNM Playroom, Department of Communications & New Media, Blk. AS6, 03-38

National University of Singapore Delegation Visits UNC

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill welcomed a delegation from the National University of Singapore (NUS) for a series of events and meetings on September 23 and 24 to discuss student exchanges and the UNC-NUS Joint Degree Program (JDP), as well as to explore other opportunities for collaboration. The visitors from NUS, one of Carolina’s six strategic partners, consisted of administrators from two schools within the university, the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, both of which have strong links with UNC.

Faculty of Arts and Social Science visitors included Robbie Goh, vice dean for international relations and special duties, and Paulin Straughan, vice dean of undergraduate studies. They met with representatives from UNC departments from the College of Arts and Sciences that are part of the UNC-NUS Joint Degree Program, including economics, geography, history, political science and English and comparative literature. They also continued discussions on student exchanges and potential opportunities in global studies.

NUS Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences delegation met with UNC administrators

Visiting administrators from the Faculty of Science included Eric Chan, vice dean of undergraduate programs, and Li Ling Koh, associate director of undergraduate programs. As biology was recently added to the Joint Degree Program, Chan and Koh met with UNC biology faculty to discuss student recruitment and other program details. They also had preliminary discussions with faculty in chemistry, mathematics and environmental studies about possibilities for student exchange and faculty collaboration.

Administrators from both schools at NUS also met with staff from the College’s Study Abroad Office, made presentations to UNC students during information sessions and also met with NUS exchange students at UNC. Currently, UNC undergraduates can study at NUS through a number of different semester exchanges in both schools at NUS, as well as through a summer science lab exchange and the Carolina Southeast Asia Summer Program.

NUS and UNC began a strategic partnership in 2003, a partnership that was solidified in 2007 with the establishment of the UNC-NUS Joint Degree Program. Since 2003, an abundance of student exchanges and relationships have flourished between NUS and UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences, the Kenan-Flagler Business School and the Eshelman School of Pharmacy.

The relationship with NUS is just one example of how partner institutions can mutually support one another. Students at each university are able to take advantage of partner strengths to expand their studies outside of their home university courses. Close to 400 UNC students have studied at NUS since 2004 – about 100 on exchange programs and almost 300 through the Carolina Southeast Asia Summer Program. Beginning in summer 2014, UNC students can also enroll in FASStrack Asia, the new international summer school in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at NUS.

“The partnership between our two universities has brought much value to our students through exchanges and joint degree programs,” said Bob Miles, associate dean for study abroad and international exchanges in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences. “We are proud of our long-standing relationship with the NUS Faculty of Arts and Sciences and enthusiastic about our more recent but growing engagement with the NUS Faculty of Science. We appreciate their time and commitment in visiting UNC and share their desire to continue to develop and strengthen our partnership.”

 

Dr. Stephen Lim’s research group wins the 2013 Singapore Psychological Society (SPS) Best Undergraduate Group Research and Overall Best Undergraduate Research Awards

The NUS Department of Psychology is very proud to have snared, among all the research entries from various Universities and Institutes in Singapore, the Best Undergraduate Group Research Award, as well as the Overall Best Undergraduate Research Award conferred by the Singapore Psychological Society (SPS) this year.

The 2013 SPS Best Undergraduate Group Research Award

For at least 350 centuries, humans have invented music that offered special aesthetic appeal. Yet, our understanding of the reasons for these preferences and effects remains fragmented. The winning work is titled “What We Move to Moves Us: Biological Rhythmicity Predicts Musical Preferences”, which tested and found support for the hypothesis that the answer lies, at least in part, in the fit between musical rhythms and human biological motions. This research was accomplished by Mr. Tan Jun Hao Nicholas and Miss Wong Shi Hui Sarah as their Undergraduate Research Opportunity Programme (UR OP) project, under the mentorship of Dr. Lim Wee Hun Stephen, the new Founding Director of the NUS Cognition Lab.

This undergraduate research has earlier been presented at the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society – the world’s landmark international research conference for Cognitive Science – in July 2013 in Berlin, Germany, and recently earned an international refereed research journal’s endorsement where one of its expert reviewers commented, “The question of music preferences and metrical regularity is interesting, and the authors’ method of determining an association between preferences and “logically human” movements to music (without sound) is cute, even ingenious”.

Miss Sarah Wong (left); Dr. Stephen Lim (centre); Mr. Nicholas Tan (right)

The 2013 SPS Overall Best Undergraduate Research Award

The winning work, by Mr. Yap Jit Yong, is titled “Media Multitasking Predicts Unitary Versus Splitting Visual Focal Attention”. Mr. Yap graduated from the NUS Department of Psychology with First-Class Honours, and had earlier completed this work as his Honours Thesis research under Dr. Lim Wee Hun Stephen’s tutelage. Dr. Lim comments, “The question of whether visual attention can split and be deployed to two separate visual spaces concurrently continues to attract vision scientists’ interest today. Here’s a quick DIY demonstration: Try really focusing into both eyes of your friend simultaneously and you’d probably feel difficult. Recent evidence suggests that splitting attention is possible, although the exact circumstances under which this happens are not well understood. Here, we show that individual differences, in terms of media multitasking, predict the splitting phenomenon; those who use multiple media forms concurrently appear to be more adept to adopt a splitting mode of attention than those who do not. Our data paved a new way of thinking about and approaching research on visual focal attention.”

This undergraduate research is currently in press at the Journal of Cognitive Psychology, an international, peer-reviewed research journal housed under the Taylor & Francis Group.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Lim and his research group on their remarkable achievements!

Dr. Stephen Lim (left); Mr. Yap Jit Yong (centre); Ms. Jennifer Teoh (right; SPS Vice-President)

Faculty Teaching Excellence Awards (FTEA) 2013

We are very pleased to extend our warmest congratulations to the following teachers on their achievements.  Thirty-nine FASS teachers have been awarded the Faculty Teaching Excellence Award 2013 for their work in 2012/13.  Of these teachers, 16 have also been nominated for the Annual Teaching Excellence Award and of these, two for the Outstanding Educator Award. We will know the outcome of these nominations in due course. Special thanks go to the Faculty Teaching Excellence Committee (comprising A/P TC Chang, Chair; Prof. Brian Farrell; A/P Narayanan Ganapathy; A/P Valerie Wee; and Dr Izumi Walker) for their work in shortlisting and nominating the winners.

NO

NAME

DEPARTMENT

1

DR

SUSAN ANG

ENGLISH LANGUAGE & LITERATURE

2

DR

ICCHA BASNYAT

COMMUNICATIONS AND NEW MEDIA

3

DR

JULIUS BAUTISTA

SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES

4

DR

CHA YEOW SIAH

PSYCHOLOGY

5

MRS

CHEN ING-RU

CENTRE FOR LANGUAGE STUDIES

6

DR

CHEN YI-CHUN

ECONOMICS

7

DR

CHEONG LEE PENG

CENTRE FOR LANGUAGE STUDIES

8

MS

SATOMI CHIBA

CENTRE FOR LANGUAGE STUDIES

9

A/P

CHIN KWEE NYET

CENTRE FOR LANGUAGE STUDIES

10

MS

CHO JIN HEE

CENTRE FOR LANGUAGE STUDIES

11

DR

VINCENT CHUA

SOCIOLOGY

12

DR

JOHN P. DIMOIA

HISTORY

13

PROF

GOH BOON HUA ROBBIE

ENGLISH LANGUAGE & LITERATURE

14

DR

CARL GRUNDY-WARR

GEOGRAPHY

15

DR

AAMIR RAFIQUE HASHMI

ECONOMICS

16

DR

MIE HIRAMOTO

ENGLISH LANGUAGE & LITERATURE

17

DR

NICHOLAS HON

PSYCHOLOGY

18

DR

RYAN HONG

PSYCHOLOGY

19

A/P

HUANG JIANLI

HISTORY

20

DR

IRVING CHAN JOHNSON

SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES

21

DR

KIM CHONGHYUCK

ENGLISH LANGUAGE & LITERATURE

22

DR

LAI PEAK YUE KAREN

GEOGRAPHY

23

DR

TERENCE LEE

POLITICAL SCIENCE

24

DR

LIM WEE HUN STEPHEN

PSYCHOLOGY

25

DR

KELVIN LOW

SOCIOLOGY

26

A/P

MAZNAH BINTI MOHAMAD

MALAY STUDIES

27

DR

CHRIS MCMORRAN

JAPANESE STUDIES

28

DR

EMI MORITA

JAPANESE STUDIES

29

DR

HARVEY NEO

GEOGRAPHY

30

DR

YOSHINOIRI NISHIZAKI

POLITICAL SCIENCE

31

DR

RAJESH RAI

SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES

32

DR

YOSUKE SATO

ENGLISH LANGUAGE & LITERATURE

33

DR

SNG TUAN HWEE

ECONOMICS

34

DR

JOONMO SON

SOCIOLOGY

35

A/P

PAULIN TAY STRAUGHAN

SOCIOLOGY

36

DR

WOON CHIH YUAN

GEOGRAPHY

37

A/P

MELVIN YAP JU-MIN

PSYCHOLOGY

38

DR

YEOH GUAN HIN GILBERT

ENGLISH LANGUAGE & LITERATURE

39

DR

ZHANG YANG

ECONOMICS

Congratulations and all the very best!