“The Cultural Studies in Asia PhD Programme has deepened the scope of my work as an artist in Singapore. I particularly enjoyed taking a range of modules across the faculty, from anthropology, to geography to philosophy. A focus on aspects of culture and politics in Asia has enabled be to understand better the place of the arts and subaltern communities in Singapore.”
Felicia Low Ee Ping
The research interests undertaken by our candidates in the Cultural Studies in Asia programme range from politics of pop music, museum and nation building, documentary films of Thailand, political and intellectual biography of Indonesian revolutionary writer Toer, urban imaginaries of Dhaka, heritage spatial politics in Malaysia, community activism and dance in India, and aesthetic engagement with history among Southeast Asian visual artists. In these cases, supervisors for the dissertation research have been drawn from the departments of Southeast Asian Studies, Sociology, Geography, English Literature, Chinese Studies and School of Architecture. For more information, please refer to: http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/soc/
Robert Williamson shares about his research in Cultural Studies in Asia, a PhD programme established in 2009.This is the only such programme taught in English in Asia.
“My research concerns documentary filmmaking in Southeast Asia, with an emphasis on how young people use the medium to formulate political positions and identities in societies where the public discussion of recent political history remains regulated or restricted. This topic is positioned at an intersection of political science, law, education, social memory and film aesthetics. The Cultural Studies in Asia program is designed to help students negotiate these kinds of complex interdisciplinary questions and construct theoretical frameworks that cut across traditional academic disciplines. It allows real flexibility and freedom to explore issues from a number of perspectives, encouraging students to take classes and choose advisors from any number of the departments within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. I feel I can approach my topic in a much more comprehensive way than a Film Studies program would normally allow, and the resulting work should be of interest to a wider range of readers.”
Dr Konstantina Griva is the principal investigator on a randomized controlled trial of self-management intervention funded by National Kidney Foundation, Singapore (HEmoDialysis Self MAnagement Randomised Trial; HED SMART). For patients receiving hemodialysis it is vital that diet, fluid and medication recommendations are closely adhered to. However, the success of self management is often patchy and the importance of following the advice is not well understood.
The work led by Dr Konstadina Griva and collaborators examined the use of a HED-SMART intervention, a four session, group based, self management intervention on treatment adherence for patients on hemodialysis. They found the HED-SMART program had significant post-intervention improvements in both clinical markers and self-report adherence.
The ERA-EDTA is one of the fastest growing Medical Association whose purpose is to encourage and to report advances in the field of clinical nephrology, dialysis, renal transplantation and related subjects. Their annual conference is the world leading event for practitioners and researchers in the fields of clinical nephrology, hypertension, dialysis and kidney transplantation.
This is the second annual Summer School, and this year, several basic and advanced courses have been added to our roster, such as Applied Data Analysis, Causal Inference, and Game Theory. More information about the various courses on offer, testimonials from last years’ participants, as well as details on financial aid can be found on our website: http://methods-school.nus.edu.sg/index.html.
Two very different films garnered the top prizes at FASS’ inaugural ‘Singapore on Screen’ Undergraduate Short Film competition when the final eight films were screened in competition on Saturday at the NUS Open Day at UTown . The winner in the fiction category was “Fire”, a moving piece that touched on intergenerational student activism and the 1989 ‘June 4th Incident’. The non-fiction winning film was completely different – “Old Toilets: Memoirs of a Daily Affair” was a fascinating, amusing, albeit discomfiting, personal historical account of Singapore’s toilet customs before modern sanitation. The runner-up films were equally diverse: “Hello, Miss”, an dark urban chiller, and “The Broken Porcelain”, a reflection on the changing face on Chinatown(s).
Chris Yeo and the film-makers of “Fire”, Chen Lingzi, Wu Si and Lee Sin Poh
Chris Yeo and winning film-maker of “Old Toilets” Tan Shin
The event, organized by the Singapore Research Nexus (SRN) www.fas.nus.edu.sg/srn, was open to all undergraduates taking a module by FASS which involved film-production in 2012. The films had to be under 15 minutes in length, be related to Singapore and could be creative works, documentaries, genre-explorations or pieces of visual ethnography. On Saturday the top eight entries were screened to the public and the four judges gave illuminating commentaries after each film for the audience and young film-makers to savour. The judges were: celebrated local film-maker and FASS Alumnus Mr Chris Yeo (Chair), Dr Ingrid Hoofd (CNM), Dr Valerie Wee (English Literature), and Dr Ivan Kwek (Sociology). The winning films each won a $500 prize with the runners up each receiving $200. In summing up, Chris Yeo commended the high quality of the films and iterated his pleasant surprise at how FASS Students have created films that would outshine films produced by their contemporaries at prestigious film schools.
A/P Michelle Lazar, Head of the SRN, introduces the judges and films
While the judges were deliberating there was a screening of “Incorporating Film-making into Coursework at FASS” a short film of interviews with FASS Faculty Members who offer film as part of their courses: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO8V5Uhf4h4&feature=youtu.be
For more details on the winners and to watch the top four films please click below:
Fire (produced for the Department of Chinese Studies module Understanding Modern China through Film) – Filmmakers:Chen Lingzi, Wang Yao, Aw Luo Min, Lee Sin Poh, Wu Si, Allison Angelene Swieca
Hello, Miss (produced for the Department of English Language and Literature module Film Genres: Stars and Styles) – Filmmakers:Haikal Aziz, Corina Tan, Kenneth Ang, Tricia Chean, Yang Tzu Hsuan
The Broken Porcelain (produced for the module Understanding Modern China through Film) – Filmmakers:Dina Berrada, Foo Fang Yu,Wong Siew Fong, Sim Wen Yan, Chua Wei Fang
We are very proud to announce that two of our undergraduates, Soh Wei Jie and Julianne Tan, have had their undergraduate research recognized by the Singapore Psychological Society. Specifically, Wei Jie won the 2012 Best Undergraduate Research Award while Julianne won the 2012 Undergraduate Research Award for Best Qualitative Research. Congratulations, Wei Jie and Julianne!
Julianne:
While recent research on autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has turned its eye towards better understanding the high rates of comorbid anxiety difficulties in children and youths with ASD, there is a knowledge gap regarding how anxiety is qualitatively experienced in their everyday lives and the impact of this condition. Specifically, in this population of children who are different in terms of the way they perceive the world, behave and express themselves, are the various triggers and signs of anxiety, and the coping strategies used, unique to ASD or shared with other common experiences of anxiety in non-ASD individuals? Most studies have so far utilized standardized checklists developed for typically developing children and not children with ASD. Important information is often missed out as we try to “fit” ASD children’s experiences into those of children without ASD. Moreover, in most cases parents provide the information; teachers, who can provide unique and important observations from the often stressful school environment, are often ignored .
Therefore, this exploratory study reported a series of focus groups discussions with teachers from Special Education schools in Singapore regarding the anxiety difficulties of their students with ASD, most of whom also have associated intellectual and adaptive behaviour limitations. Teachers were interviewed in depth about their experiences with regards to their students’ anxiety triggers, signs, impact and strategies employed to manage anxiety. Their rich narratives were coded verbatim and a detailed coding system was developed to explore shared and autism-specific themes emerging from their perspectives. Taken together, the teachers’ views were strikingly consistent and provided a unique constellation of findings. Teachers identified change/unpredictability, aversive sensory experiences, social-communication difficulties and being prevented from engaging in stereotyped interests and activities as ASD-specific triggers of anxiety. These are thought to reflect common ASD-specific difficulties in sensory sensitivities, impairments in communication and perspective taking, and inflexible processing styles respectively. In addition, they also identified anxiety triggers that are shared with non-ASD individuals, such as specific phobias and performance-related demands. Strong themes were evident when we asked teachers how they can tell that their students are anxious, with most saying that they largely “see” anxiety in their students’ behaviour. For example, when children with ASD get anxious they will engage in more challenging, sensory or repetitive behaviours and more avoidance/escape behaviors.
The focus group results were also used to examine the potential validity of an existing framework of ASD-related stressors that has been proposed to account for heightened anxiety in ASD. While the existing model by Wood and Gadow was largely supported by the findings of the study, we also argued that the model was incomplete and that a more broad-based conceptualisation of anxiety across the entire autism spectrum is required.
Wei Jie:
The winning work is entitled “Hear No Evil: Can Music Attenuate the Irrelevant Speech Effect?”. Dr. Lim commented, “Many students listen to music while they study. We believe that this phenomenon transcends preferences towards learning styles, so that the benefits reaped from music listening during study actually have a very fundamental (biological) basis. Our goal was to show that music helps to consolidate cognitive resources that will in turn boost learning. Imagine the following scenario: In a noisy environment that is highly distracting, music creates this “transparent room”; when you step in (and close the door behind you), the distractors surround the room, remain visible (or rather, audible) and intelligible, are in fact processed, but they can no longer stifle you. Importantly, we think that it is the “music-ness” in music that creates this fascinating effect (which is why students listen to “music” in the first place). Through this work, we also hope to understand at least in part just what exactly constitutes “music”, a long-standing philosophical question that continues to fascinate scholars across a variety of fields.” For more information, go to our earlier story: https://blog.nus.edu.sg/fassnews/2012/10/22/nus-department-of-psychology-wins-singapore-psychological-society-sps-best-undergraduate-research-award-2012/
Among the top psychological research entries from the respective Universities and Institutes in Singapore, the NUS Department of Psychology is proud to have won the overall Best Undergraduate Research Award conferred by the Singapore Psychological Society (SPS) this year. This Award recognizes the top psychological research of the year accomplished by an undergraduate student, and can be withheld unless there is a deserving candidate. Mr. Soh Wei Jie, who recently graduated from the NUS Department of Psychology with First-Class Honours, pursued his undergraduate thesis research under the supervision of Dr. Lim Wee Hun Stephen, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology who has won multiple awards for excellent teaching and student research supervision. Mr. Soh’s thesis research emerged as the best among all 83 Honours Theses received and examined by the NUS Psychology Department in the 2011-12 academic year, and was subsequently nominated for the 2012 SPS Undergraduate Research Award.
Dr. Stephen Lim (left); Mr. Soh Wei Jie (centre); SPS President and MinDef Psychology Head Col. Dr. Bernard Lim (right)
The winning work is entitled “Hear No Evil: Can Music Attenuate the Irrelevant Speech Effect?”. Dr. Lim commented, “Many students listen to music while they study. We believe that this phenomenon transcends preferences towards learning styles, so that the benefits reaped from music listening during study actually have a very fundamental (biological) basis. Our goal was to show that music helps to consolidate cognitive resources that will in turn boost learning. Imagine the following scenario: In a noisy environment that is highly distracting, music creates this “transparent room”; when you step in (and close the door behind you), the distractors surround the room, remain visible (or rather, audible) and intelligible, are in fact processed, but they can no longer stifle you. Importantly, we think that it is the “music-ness” in music that creates this fascinating effect (which is why students listen to “music” in the first place). Through this work, we also hope to understand at least in part just what exactly constitutes “music”, a long-standing philosophical question that continues to fascinate scholars across a variety of fields.”
Our heartiest congratulations to Mr. Soh and Dr. Lim on winning this Award!
Annett Schirmer and her graduate student Nicolas Escoffier recently presented a study on the effects of rhythmic sound at the 2012 Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting (http://www.sfn.org/am2012/), a major conference that attracts more than 30,000 attendees.
Dr Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied, Assistant Professor in the Department of Malay Studies has been invited to be an Honorary Research Associate at La Trobe University, Australia. It is a position usually reserved for senior academics and to be invited for this post is a rare honour for someone relatively new to the academe. We caught up with Dr. Aljunied to hear more about this accolade and his research: http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/research/khairudininterview.html
Prof Ho Teck Hua, Vice President (Research Strategy), NUS, giving the Opening Address
The Department of Economics, FASS and the Civil Service College (CSC) recently organised a two-day conference on “”Evidence-based Public Policy Using Administrative Data” attended by almost 280 participants. This marks the first time an academic institution and a government agency have come together to provide a platform for international and local academics to meet with Singapore public policymakers to explore the untapped possibilities of using administrative data to make sensible, informed policy decisions that are backed by robust scientific evidence.
The welcome address was given by Guest-of-Honour, Prof Ho Teck Hua, Vice President (Research Strategy), and Tan Chin Tuan Centennial Professor, NUS, and was followed by keynote presentations by Dr Victor Lavy (William Haber Chaired Professor of Economics at Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Dr Zhang Junsen (Wei Lun Professor of Economics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong) and Dr Francis Kramarz (Director of CREST-INSEE). The presentations were on a wide range of research which utilised administrative data. Amongst other topics, the speakers demonstrated how increasing the budget allocated per class of students could have a positive impact on academic achievement and behaviour in Israel; and shed light on how population control policies affected household saving patterns in China.
“Administrative data provides a wealth of data points to evaluate and develop new policy. With its typically larger sample size and inherent longitudinal structure, administrative data enables researchers to follow individuals over time and address many critical policy questions. This is the first time that the NUS Department of Economics is partnering the Civil Service College to organise such a conference and we look forward to continuing this exchange of ideas between policymakers and members of academia,” commented Prof Ho Teck Hua.
Dr Jessica Pan, Department of Economics, FASS, chairing the session on Education and Family
Amongst the international speakers present, representatives from the Department of Economics included Dr Wong Wei Kang, who presented his paper on “Does an Additional Year of Schooling Improve Skills in Reading, Mathematics and Science? Regression Discontinuity due to Imprecise Control over Birthdates”, which was authored together with Khaw Kaimin, a recent Honours graduate of the Department. The other representative of the Department was Dr Zhang Wei who looked athow quality disclosures affect the behaviour health care providers in “Are Two Report Cards Better than One? The Case of Coronary Artery Bypass Graft (CABG) Surgery and Patient Scoring”.
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