7 February 2025 |
Older Adults' Daily Needs and Care Practices in Local Neighbourhoods: A Community-Centric Model (CCCM) in Singapore
by Dr. Zhang Wei (Research Fellow, NUS Cities)
Adopting an "everyday practice of care" perspective and employing mixed research methods, this study examines how the neighbourhood built environment shapes care practices for older adults. The findings reveal that older adults' care needs span financial care, social care, physical care, psychological care, and medical care. The built environment impacts these practices directly or indirectly through five key factors: (i) housing, (ii) public open spaces, (iii) neighbourhood design and planning, (iv) care facilities and amenities, and (v) transportation.
14 February 2025 |
"What's love got to do with it?" Buses, fandom, and social media in Singapore
by Ass't Prof. Sneha Annavarapu (Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, NUS and Urban Studies Faculty, Yale-NUS College
This sharing will present a paper which is part of an emergent project in which we aim to better understand a community of (mostly) young men in Singapore who call themselves “bus fans”. Tracing what they do, and how they navigate their unabashed—and socially “deviant”—attachment to buses, we seek to complicate stereotypical narratives around bus fandom. Broadly speaking, bus fans are people who devote significant time and attention to buses and trains like the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT). They engage in “bus spotting”, taking photos of buses, joyriding, collecting brochures and memorabilia about buses, and have extensive information about urban history, bus routes and bus mechanics. Bus fans are not particular to Singapore but exist in several other parts of the world and this transnational community is anchored in a collective and so-called “obsessive” love for buses.
In this paper, we explore how self-identifying bus fans in Singapore narrate and represent their fandom. Through analyzing interviews with and social media interactions among bus fans, we study how they understand their relationship to buses, and how they navigate the stigma of bus fandom: what kinds of desires and aspirations do bus fans have? How do they participate in urban life? What does social media offer in terms of a platform of community and/or visibility for this subcultural community? These questions, we argue, present us with an opportunity to better understand how fandom subcultures, public infrastructure, and social media platforms interact and produce urban play and practice.
Furthermore, bus fandom presents a unique disposition towards mass transit that goes above and beyond technocratic and economistic framings of transit systems that center development, sustainability, efficiency, and equity. Leveraging the narrative and affective potency of fandom offers us the possibility of better understanding urban belonging. Theoretically, then, we posit a “queering” of infrastructure studies by centering love, attachment, and intimacy as critical to radical reimaginations of large technical systems such as public transit. Thinking about infrastructure as social, affective, and an aesthetic project produced and reproduced by the state and citizens alike, bus fandom becomes a window through which to view the surprising mediations that constitute the Asian city.
Sneha Annavarapu is an assistant professor of sociology at the National University of Singapore, jointly appointed with the South Asian Studies Programme and Yale NUS College. Her research interests centre around the politics of transportation, infrastructure, class relations, and gender in contemporary Indian cities. She has published articles in Area, Social Problems, Journal of Historical Sociology, and Journal of Consumer Culture and is currently working on a book project titled On The Move: the politics of driving in India. She is also involved in an ongoing project about transport fandom and urban socialities in Asia. Sneha is a regular host on the New Books Network podcast and co-founder of ‘Ethnographic Marginalia’.
21 February 2025 |
Vital Links: The Healthcare Impacts of Transporation Network
by Assoc Professor Ma Lin (Associate Professor of Economics and Lee Kong Chian Fellow, Singapore Management University)
Improved transportation networks allow individuals in remote areas to access quality medical resources in larger cities. Using data from China's road and railroad networks alongside hospital admission records, this paper estimates the distance elasticity of medical travel for major diseases. Based on the estimated elasticity, this paper develops a spatial model in which individual patients choose treatment locations based on the transportation network, income, and disease severity. Counterfactual analysis shows that the improvements in transportation networks in the early 21st century significantly reduced the mortality rates for cancer and cerebro-cardiovascular patients due to improved medical access, especially for individuals living in remote locations.
MA Lin is an Associate Professor of Economics at Singapore Management University. He earned a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan, a Master's in Economics from the University of Pittsburgh, and Bachelor's degrees in Economics and History from Peking University. Dr Ma's research focuses on international trade, economic geography, and inequality.
28 February 2025 |
Complexity Science in AI - insights on how statistical physics applied to non-physics disciplines
by Dr. Feng Ling (Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Physics, NUS and Manager of Complex System Group, Institute of High Performance Computing, A*STAR)
The 2024 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to the contribution of statistical physics in artificial neural networks. What is less known is that, the ‘statistical physics tool’ behind – also called spin glasses theory - was also awarded to the 2021 Nobel prize in physics for the contribution to complex systems. In this sharing, I will talk about the history of this theory, how it set the foundation for the study of (artificial, natural and social) complex systems, and what are the practical insights in the world we live today.
Dr Feng Ling specializes in complex systems research, both in theoretical foundations and practical problems, ranging from the statistical physics behind deep learning to social systems. In his theoretical studies, he looks at the complexity and phase transition phenomena in artificial neural networks, trying to uncover the working principle of deep learning. He has also been working on the various percolation transition phenomenon in inter-dependent complex networks to develop frameworks to construct different phases in spreading phenomena. In the application of complexity theories, he has applied complex network theories to various social and economic networks ranging from social media, financial networks and blockchain networks, building predictive algorithms in synergy with various machine learning algorithms.
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