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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Framing Asian Atmospheres: Imperial Weather Science And The Problem Of The Local C.1880–1950, Fiona Williamson
Framing Asian Atmospheres: Imperial Weather Science And The Problem Of The Local C.1880–1950, Fiona Williamson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
It would be of the greatest importance to meteorology’, noted the editor of the Singapore Chronicle in 1829, ‘if a set of hourly meteorological observations could be instituted at Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Singapore, Malacca, and some station on the elevated plains of Hindostan’. 1 Of course, the author’s comments speak from a uniquely imperial perspective, whereby such observations would benefit the colonial service of – in this case – the British Empire, enabling enhanced knowledge of imperial atmospheres and the related economic and scientific benefits that this could bring. That meteorology was closely linked to empire and imperial control has …
Selling A Resume And Buying A Job: Stratification Of Gender And Occupation By States And Brokers In International Migration From Indonesia, Andy Scott Chang
Selling A Resume And Buying A Job: Stratification Of Gender And Occupation By States And Brokers In International Migration From Indonesia, Andy Scott Chang
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This study examines how state and commercial actors construct gender, occupation, and nationality hierarchies in guest worker programs by comparing the migratory procedures for female domestic workers and male industrial operators from Indonesia. Based on 19 months of multi-sited ethnography and 86 interviews in Indonesia, Taiwan, and Singapore, I introduce the notion of multilateralism to theorize the stratification of global migration processes. In multilateral labor markets, governments, brokers, employers, and migrants in multiple countries contend for labor and employment. The homecare market is governed under the rubric of “selling a resume,” whereby Indonesian regulators and labor suppliers pass on recruitment …
Guest Editorial: Disaster, State And Science: Historical Narratives Of Extreme Weather In East Asia And The Pacific, Fiona Williamson
Guest Editorial: Disaster, State And Science: Historical Narratives Of Extreme Weather In East Asia And The Pacific, Fiona Williamson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This curated special issue asks how history can be used as a lens into disaster and disaster management. It takes as its premise the idea that approaches from different disciplines - including the humanities and social sciences – can offer new perspectives on understanding disaster, managing disaster and disaster risk. The concept is not new, historically focussed studies have long provided meat for hazard investigations and modelling, especially those focused on geological or hydrological time-series analyses; multi-hazard interactions and identifying historical underliers for contemporary risk. It has become increasingly common, for example, to include historians in collaborative efforts to better …
A Question Of Scale: Making Meteorological Knowledge And Nation In Imperial Asia, Fiona Williamson, Vladimir Jankovic
A Question Of Scale: Making Meteorological Knowledge And Nation In Imperial Asia, Fiona Williamson, Vladimir Jankovic
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This special issue of History of Meteorology explores processes of making, communicating, and embedding modern meteorological knowledge in late nineteenth and early twentieth century imperial Asia. Its focus is on the institutionalisation of meteorology in key nation-building activities such as developing agricultural services, synoptic mapping to predict storms, and participation in scientific organisations and initiatives. Collectively, the essays explore the intersection of local, regional, and international scales and processes in generating new forms of state-sponsored meteorological practices and institutions, though complex multi-layered networks involving different actors and modes of information flow across multiple scales. In so doing, they reveal the …
Flood Mortality In Se Asia: Can Palaeo-Historical Information Help Save Lives?, Alan D. Ziegler, H. S. Lim, Robert J. Wasson, Fiona Williamson
Flood Mortality In Se Asia: Can Palaeo-Historical Information Help Save Lives?, Alan D. Ziegler, H. S. Lim, Robert J. Wasson, Fiona Williamson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Asia is one of the world's most flood-prone regions by many metrics: high flood magnitudes, frequency, severity; the number countries affected, the area of inundation; the number of people at risk; and importantly, flood-related fatalities (AIR, 2014; Luo, Maddoks, Iceland, Ward, & Winsemius, 2015; Table 1). We explore the idea that flood-related mortality from river over-bank flows in the SE Asian region could be reduced by incorporating evidence from the past to foster a better understanding of the realm of plausible flood regimes, and hopefully guide improved flood hazard management practices in the future (Lebel, Manuta, & Garden, 2011).
Archives Of Societies And Historical Climatology In East And Southeast Asia, Fiona Williamson, Qing Pei
Archives Of Societies And Historical Climatology In East And Southeast Asia, Fiona Williamson, Qing Pei
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Major sources of social archives for paleoclimatology in East and Southeast Asia include ancient annals and chronicles, instrumental records from government, military or missionary bodies, and private records such as diaries. Records are rich but scattered and of inconsistent quality, often requiring different forms of cross-validation and homogenization from those in the Western world. This article discusses these source types.
Disasters And The Making Of Asian History, Chris Courtney, Fiona Williamson
Disasters And The Making Of Asian History, Chris Courtney, Fiona Williamson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Environmental historians have often been drawn to disasters. They have unearthed the often-forgotten stories of erupting volcanoes, raging rivers and rainless skies, and in so doing have reminded their colleagues from more anthropocentric disciplines that the societies, economies and cultures they study are part of broader physical systems. In addition to highlighting the agency of nature, however, disasters have also helped to remind us that environmental history remains at heart a humanistic discipline. It should never be simply a lament for lost natural habitats, but also a discipline which offers a unique prism through which to study people. It is …
Revisiting The Miller-Kanazawa Debate: Should Asia Be Afforded More Attention From Evolutionary Psychologists?, Sean Teck Hao Lee
Revisiting The Miller-Kanazawa Debate: Should Asia Be Afforded More Attention From Evolutionary Psychologists?, Sean Teck Hao Lee
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
A decade ago, Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa and Dr. Geoffrey Miller, two renowned evolutionary psychologists, participated in a debate on whether evolutionary psychologists should focus on Asia in their quest to establish a stronghold in the general field of psychology. Despite painstaking efforts to foster greater receptiveness among Western psychologists toward an evolutionary perspective of psychological phenomena, most still seem to be critically reserved toward it; favoring instead proximate sociocultural explanations of psychological phenomena as stipulated by the standard social science model. Facing such an inertia, Miller suggested that it may perhaps be wise to re-direct the field's efforts on the …
What Does Successful Aging Mean? Lay Perception Of Successful Aging Among Elderly Singaporeans, Qiushi Feng, Paulin Tay Straughan
What Does Successful Aging Mean? Lay Perception Of Successful Aging Among Elderly Singaporeans, Qiushi Feng, Paulin Tay Straughan
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Objectives: We explore the culturally specific meaning of successful aging in Singapore, an ethnically diverse city-state in Asia. We aim to investigate lay perceptions of successful aging among the elderly individuals in Singapore and further examine variations of these perceptions. Methods: We applied a mixed-method research design. Firstly, we conducted qualitative interviews with 49 elderly respondents, generating 12 main subjective components of successful aging. Next, we did a national survey with a sample of 1,540 local residents aged 50 to 69 years, in which respondents were asked to evaluate the importance of each subjective component of successful aging. We used …
Human-Scale Economics: Economic Growth And Poverty Reduction In Northeastern Thailand, Joel D. Moore, John A. Donaldson
Human-Scale Economics: Economic Growth And Poverty Reduction In Northeastern Thailand, Joel D. Moore, John A. Donaldson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Under what conditions does economic growth benefit the poor? One way to answer this question is to identify and compare positive and negative outlier areas, those that experience greater and lesser poverty reduction, respectively, compared to what was anticipated given their levels of economic growth. The more similar these areas, the more leverage there is to unearth the factors that allow the poor to benefit from growth. In this paper, we employ an inductive approach to glean possible pathways out of poverty from two highly similar underdeveloped neighboring provinces in northeastern Thailand. Using extensive fieldwork and interviews, we explore factors …
The Public Roles Of The Private Sector In Asia: The Emerging Research Agenda, Ann Florini
The Public Roles Of The Private Sector In Asia: The Emerging Research Agenda, Ann Florini
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
It is no longer possible to understand public policy without focusing intensively on the public roles of the business sector. The world is awash in experimental private governance, from corporate codes of conduct, to demands for disclosure of private sector environmental and social impacts, to ‘social enterprises’ that aim to save the world the profitable way. Such experiments are emerging within Asia, changing the terms of the social licence to operate as society becomes more adept at making demands for good corporate citizenship and as the natural resource crisis begins to hit home. And as Asian corporations go global, they …
The Uneven Representation Of Women In Asian Parliaments: Explaining Variation Across The Region, Devin K. Joshi, Kara Kingma
The Uneven Representation Of Women In Asian Parliaments: Explaining Variation Across The Region, Devin K. Joshi, Kara Kingma
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Although home to the majority of the world's women, Asia is the continent with the smallest proportion of women in Parliament. Rarely studied from a comparative perspective, this article examines the uneven representation of women in the lower houses of contemporary Asian parliaments. While socio-economic modernization and industrialization are generally expected to increase the proportion of women in positions of political influence, we find that differences in electoral and party systems across Asia play a greater role than levels of female literacy, urbanization, or per capita income. In particular, Asian parliaments with strict quotas and a higher number of (three …
Women’S Entry Into Self-Employment In Urban China: The Role Of Family In Creating Gendered Mobility Patterns, Qian Forrest Zhang, Zi Pan
Women’S Entry Into Self-Employment In Urban China: The Role Of Family In Creating Gendered Mobility Patterns, Qian Forrest Zhang, Zi Pan
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
How did family characteristics affect women and men differently in self-employment participation in urban China? Analyses of national data show dual marriage penalties for women. Marketization made married women more vulnerable to lay-offs from state-sector jobs; their likelihood of being pushed into unskilled self-employment surpassed that of any other groups. The revitalized patriarchal family tradition favored men in family businesses and resulted in their higher rates of entering entrepreneurial self-employment. Married women who had the education to pursue entrepreneurial self-employment were constrained by family responsibilities to state-sector jobs for access to family services, and had much lower rates in entering …
Introduction: Contested Landscapes, Asian Cities, Lily Kong, Lisa Law
Introduction: Contested Landscapes, Asian Cities, Lily Kong, Lisa Law
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
A decade and a half after Cosgrove and Jackson (1987) wrote their seminal piece on ‘new’ cultural geography, the discipline of geography has experienced a ‘cultural’ turn. Economic geography, for instance, has been infleected through perspectives that take on board cultural retheorisations (see Thrift and Olds, 1996; Thrift, 2000). Within urban studies, the acknowledgement of culture’s powers is not new (see, for example, Agnew et al., 1984). Yet, geographers scrutinising urban landscapes have moved the field, using some of the retheorised perspectives that Cosgrove and Jackson (1987) encapsulated. Of most pertinence to this volume is the retheorised notion of culture …
The Development Of Social And Cultural Geographies In Taiwan: Knowledge Production And Social Relevance, Hsin-Ling Wu, Sue-Ching Jou, Lily Kong
The Development Of Social And Cultural Geographies In Taiwan: Knowledge Production And Social Relevance, Hsin-Ling Wu, Sue-Ching Jou, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Social and cultural geographies have long occupied a marginal position in Taiwan's scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Despite the influence of the so-called ‘cultural turn’ that has characterized much of Anglo-American scholarship since the 1990s (Barnett 1998), Taiwan's scholarship in the social sciences in general and human geography more specifically has remained relatively untouched by these intellectual currents till very recent years. This paper seeks to examine the social, intellectual and institutional contexts that explain this marginalization, and consider the possibilities for social and cultural geographies' emergence from marginality in Taiwan in the future. This possibility is considered …
Knowledges Of The Creative Economy: Towards A Relational Geography Of Diffusion And Adaptation In Asia, Lily Kong, Chris Gibson, Louisa-May Khoo, Anne-Louise Semple
Knowledges Of The Creative Economy: Towards A Relational Geography Of Diffusion And Adaptation In Asia, Lily Kong, Chris Gibson, Louisa-May Khoo, Anne-Louise Semple
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Recent dialogues in geography and the social sciences have reminded researchers of the extent to which academic and policy knowledges are socially and spatially embedded-that is, they circulate through formal and informal systems of publishing, exchange, commodification and cultural influence. Academic and policy knowledges are, in short, very much a part of the creative economy. In light of this, our paper surveys knowledges of the creative economy itself, as reflected in a geography of industry reports and government policy statements in selected Asian countries. Using a post-positivist framework adapted from diffusion theory, we critically interpret the circulation, mutation and adaptation …
Refocusing On Qualitative Methods: Problems And Prospects For Research In A Specific Asian Context, Lily Kong
Refocusing On Qualitative Methods: Problems And Prospects For Research In A Specific Asian Context, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
A recent issue of Area (1996, Volume 28.2) devoted space to six papers on focus groups, attesting to their increasing importance as a means of obtaining qualitative data. The papers provided interesting insights into the use of focus groups in specific research and cultural contexts, and raised three main issues in my mind. The first is a continuing misunderstanding as to the nature of knowledge, which surfaces in discussions of, and approaches to, the use of qualitative methods such as focus groups. The second is the range of related techniques that are actually involved in the qualitative method, known as …