Transcript
The Included: Thinking with Disability Studies in Singapore
Kuansong Victor Zhuang, PhD Candidate, Disability Studies and Cultural Studies, The University of Illinois in Chicago and Macquarie University
How are disabled people included? What does being included mean? Who is included? Inclusion is increasingly an aim of Singaporean society; yet inclusion while desirable and seemingly benevolent, also creates effects of control and containment. Exploring inclusion as a biopolitical strategy, this seminar highlights the emergence of a new figure of disability – the included. It thinks through the various logics of inclusion vis-à-vis the emergence of disability studies as an interdisciplinary intellectual movement. How can we think differently about inclusion in Singapore and the discipline of disability studies?
Kuansong Victor Zhuang is a PhD candidate in Disability Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Macquarie University. He hopes to use his research to contribute to current debates about how inclusion happens both in Singapore and around the world.
Zhuang’s seminar is organised in collaboration with the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University.
DISCUSSANT
Philip Holden is an independent researcher and former Professor of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Counselling Psychology at the University of British Columbia, continuing a movement away from critical and towards therapeutic forms of knowledge making. In his 25 years of scholarship, his research has been primarily focused around teaching and researching Singapore Literature, as well as life writing or auto/biography studies. More.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
The Singapore Studies Junior Scholar Seminars are organised by AcademiaSG, an international collective of Singaporean scholars, as part of our mission to promote research on Singapore. If you are a PhD student or post-doctoral scholar with research to share, read our Call for Proposals. We also welcome essays and commentaries for our Academic Views section. Write to our editors through our contact form to pitch an idea.