Seven years ago, we launched the website Academia.SG to promote public-facing scholarship about Singapore. Seven years on, our volunteer collective of Singaporean scholars continues to be encouraged by the support we’ve received from fellow academics, students, and the wider community of socially engaged Singaporeans.

Our website received more than 91,000 visitors in 2025, up 13% from 2024. Our newsletter reaches more than 5,200 subscribers, up 18% from the previous year. More than 4,000 follow our relatively new Instagram account. For the first time last year, we produced short explainer videos for voter education. The most-watched of these videos drew more than 230,000 views. Our occasional online events have also been welcomed: our panel discussion the morning after last May’s General Election had more than 47,000 views.

We don’t just measure our impact by the audience size. We continue to make space for thought-provoking academic views that may not get an airing in mainstream media or other popular platforms. And, we run our relatively niche Junior Scholar Seminar series to encourage a new generation of PhD students and postdoctoral scholars who have chosen to study Singapore. Now five years old, it remains the only international, multidisciplinary venue of its kind. 

In addition to pushing for more academic freedom, we want to break mental barriers that separate academics from other knowledge producers such as journalists, artists, and community organisers. It is often said that people are Singapore’s only resource. If so, we should be thinking together, not in silos.

Underlying these efforts is our belief in a more open and just society, and academics’ role in getting Singapore there. Seven years ago, we came together to advocate against the government’s plan to regulate whatever ministers consider online falsehoods. We saw POFMA as symptomatic of the state’s tendency to short-circuit debates through the application of power instead of developing the public’s capacities for discernment and judgment. The POFMA Bill was nonetheless passed by Parliament on 8 May 2019. 

We responded to this disappointment by setting up AcademiaSG, turning an unsuccessful one-off lobbying exercise into a habit of public engagement — driven not by the prospect of immediate results but by our values and principles. Our constituency’s support for such work has been priceless. Thank you.

— Linda Lim, Cherian George, Teo You Yenn & Chong Ja Ian