Welcome to our fourth iteration of the HSA1000 Poster Symposium!

HSA1000: Asian Interconnections is an integrated module in the College of Humanities and Sciences. Our module emphasizes group work as well as experiential learning, and as part of that mandate we ask our students to put together a group project on a neighbourhood of their choice in Singapore. With the easing of pandemic restrictions on campus, we are eager to bring the work that our students have done to the broader community at the university in the form of this poster symposium.

Our students produced more than 200 posters for this project, and each of our tutorial groups selected one poster to represent them in this symposium. The theme for this semester is Making sense of [your neighbourhood], and our students have taken this prompt in many creative directions.

The posters have been arranged into four geographic categories (more details below), and current HSA1000 students will have an opportunity to vote on their favorites over the next few days. The winner in each category will be announced live on Wednesday during the students’ lecture and will enjoy bragging rights for all of eternity.

For the purposes of this symposium, the posters have been categorized according to these regions:

• Historic Core (Blue)
• Close to NUS (Orange)
• Pretty Close to NUS (Yellow)
• Far from NUS (Purple)

These four regions are fundamentally arbitrary (indeed, we discussed the arbitrary nature of many regional boundaries in our first lecture). They are simply meant to encourage our students to branch out to neighbourhoods that have received less attention in past iterations of this project. As you will see, some groups actively crossed these boundaries in their projects.

To allow for this while preventing any shenanigans (e.g. four sites in Chinatown and one site on Pulau Ubin), we placed these boundary-crossing posters in the category with the most competition. The largest number of posters cover the Historic Core, which includes popular neighbourhoods like Chinatown and Tiong Bahru. This semester it just so happened that the category with the least competition is Far From NUS. Future HSA1000 students who are feeling a little competitive, take note!

This symposium was made possible by a generous Teaching Enhancement Grant from the Dean’s Office of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.