Department of Architecture Doctoral Candidate Clinches Prestigious 2023 Best Graduate Student Paper Prize from Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography
It is with great enthusiasm that we convey the news of Zhijian Sun, a doctoral student from the Department of Architecture, being conferred the prestigious 2023 Best Graduate Student Paper Prize by the Editorial Board of the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (SJTG) for his scholarly article ‘Framing China’s tropics: Thermal techno-politics of socialist tropical architecture in Africa (1960s−1980s)’. This accolade is a testament to Zhijian Sun’s research excellence and his significant contribution to the academic community, reflecting the high standards of scholarship expected at our institution.
The paper seeks to position socialist China in the mobility of global socialism in the context of Cold-War politics. It examines how the techno-politics of China and the Soviet-bloc’s socialist tropical architecture differently reconfigured thermal exchanges between the environment, human body and a series of other multi-scalar things in Africa during the 1960s−1980s. Drawing on the theories of thermal material culture, techno-politics and science and technology studies (STS), it constructs a cross-cultural comparison between China and Soviet-bloc, aiming to achieve a more nuanced techno-political understanding of mid-late twentieth century socialist architecture in the Global South. It also hopes to contribute to recent scholarship about thermal comfort and governance in the context of climate change.
Click here to read the wining paper
About Zhijian Sun
Zhijian Sun is a current doctoral student at NUS Department of Architecture. His research focuses on the architectural history of “China’s two tropics” (1950s-80s) in the global context, namely the transnational socio-techno-political entanglements between the subtropical architecture in the Southern China and China’s foreign-aid tropical architecture in the decolonizing Global South. Zhijian obtained his Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design at Columbia University in the City of New York and the Bachelor of Architecture degree at Southeast University in China.
About Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography
Since 1953 the SJTG (and antecedents) has been a leading international forum for scholarship on tropical environments, localities and their connections. It publishes theoretical and empirical articles and reviews that deal with the physical and human environments of the tropics and development issues from geographical as well as interrelated disciplinary viewpoints that advance research on tropical natures, places or interconnections.