Professor Lynette J. Chua is a law and society scholar with research interests in legal mobilisation, legal consciousness, and rights, power, and resistance. She is a Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore (NUS), with a joint appointment at Yale-NUS as Rector of Elm College and Head of Studies for the Double-Degree Programme in Law and Liberal Arts. She is also the President of the Asian Law & Society Association (from 2022 to 2023).

Prof Chua is conducting two research projects, which differ in empirical focus but share the same intellectual concern that runs through all of her research, namely, to interrogate the dynamics of legal power, social norms, and human agency. One project is a qualitative, empirical study of filial responsibility laws in China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Singapore that require adult children to provide financial maintenance and, in some instances, emotional care, to their elderly parents. Prof Chua is interested in whether and how such laws are used and how they relate to shifting practices of filial piety and intergenerational relationships, as the respective societies undergo changes to population flows, economic development, and family structures. The other project, titled ‘Governing through Contagion’ (in collaboration with NUS Adjunct Senior Research Fellow Dr Jack Jin Gary Lee), is an ethnography of how colonial empires and post-colonies combat contagious diseases, and how their strategies of control produce and emerge from a web of relationships among humans, creatures, and legal and other technologies.

Prof Chua is the author of The Politics of Rights and Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press, in press), The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as A Way of Life (Stanford University Press, 2019) and Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State (Temple University Press, 2014). In her latest monograph, ‘The Politics of Rights and Southeast Asia’, she develops the law and society theory of politics of rights as the analytical entry point to understand rights in a culturally and politically diverse region such as Southeast Asia. She advances the theoretical framework of politics of rights with the case of Southeast Asia, as well as offers an analysis of rights in Southeast Asia using the framework. With this monograph, she hopes to provide a view of politics of rights – from the Global South region and from the ground – to encourage more astute evaluations of the power and limits of rights.

Her 2019 book, The Politics of Love in Myanmar, is an ethnography of how human rights are collectively mobilised and practised on the ground, how they relate to larger social forces, and how the emotions and relationships that people have with and through human rights perpetuate their practice and construct their meanings. The book was awarded the Asian Law & Society Association’s 2019 Distinguished Book Prize and the Honorable Mention for the 2019 Gordon Hirabayashi Human Rights Book Award by the Human Rights Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Her first book, Mobilizing Gay Singapore, is an ethnographic study of Singapore’s gay and lesbian movement, and the complex role of law and meanings of rights under authoritarian conditions. Mobilizing Gay Singapore received the 2015 Distinguished Book Award from the ASA Sociology of Law Section, and the 2015 Book Accolade for Ground-breaking Matter from the International Convention of Asian Scholars. It was selected as a finalist by the Socio-legal Studies Association for the 2015 Hart Socio-legal Prize for Early Career Academics and the European Southeast Asian Studies Association for the 2015 Book Prize.

See biography.

• Legal mobilisation
• Legal consciousness
• Rights, power, and resistance

See personal website https://lynettechua.academia.edu/, or CV.

• Conducting Qualitative Socio-legal Research
• Law & Resistance
• Interdisciplinary Legal Research Methods