Beyond the classroom: Yale-NUS faculty’s external engagements

Yale-NUS faculty work tirelessly to ensure academic life in the College thrives. In addition to their work on campus, some faculty members venture beyond the classroom to apply their skills in different fields. Head of Studies (Urban Studies) and Associate Professor of Social Sciences (Sociology, Urban Studies) Ho Kong Chong, Assistant Professor of Social Sciences (Urban Studies) Sneha Annavarapu and Vice President (Engagement) and Senior Lecturer of Social Sciences (Sociology and Political Science) Trisha Craig share the various ways they make their research accessible to the larger public and how their work helps reshape student experiences as a result.

Head of Studies (Urban Studies) and Associate Professor of Social Sciences (Sociology, Urban Studies) Ho Kong Chong, Vice President (Engagement) and Senior Lecturer of Social Sciences (Sociology and Political Science) Trisha Craig and Assistant Professor Social Sciences (Urban Studies) Sneha Annavarapu. Pictures by Ho Kong Chong, Trisha Craig and Sneha Annavarapu.

What external engagements are you involved in?

Assoc Prof Ho: Two projects stand out which involve students at Yale-NUS. The first is an offshoot of the project with Singapore Ministry of National Development (MND)’s Municipal Services Office on how residents can be better involved in tackling municipal issues such as litter and noise. This was a project which involved the Toa Payoh East Zone Residents’ Network. The community leader also wanted us to collect stories from residents of two rental blocks which were facing relocation, for their newsletter. I involved student volunteers from my urban heritage and identity class and the result was a feature article in  Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) publication Urban Solutions.

The other project started with an education grant I received from the Ng Teng Fong Community Foundation. One of the components of the grant is that I get to take the Urban Heritage class to Beijing so that the class can do a comparative paper on any of the following topics: heritage as tourist attractions, adaptive reuse of heritage buildings, and heritage crafts and foods.

Dr Craig: I do a lot of writing, speaking and interviews on geopolitics, and to a lesser extent on gender issues. Some of the media outlets I have worked with are Channel NewsAsia (CNA), MoneyFM89.3, and Monocle Radio.

Asst Prof Sneha: I am a regular host on the New Books Network (NBN) podcast on which I interview authors of new academic books. In each episode, the author and I converse about what drew them to their academic discipline, their research interests, how the book came into being, and the arguments of the book. I also co-founded and co-edit the website Ethnographic Marginalia, where we showcase ethnographic essays and reflections on ethnography as a method and practice. We also interview ethnographers on our podcast.

What inspired you to take part in these external engagements?

Assoc Prof Ho: Since coming to Yale-NUS two years ago, I have been more cognisant of opportunities to combine research with teaching as a way for my students to learn about issues beyond the classroom.

Dr Craig: I think there are a lot of issues that people care about and public writing and doing interviews is a good way to engage them. By public writing, I mean things like editorials, where you can get across complicated ideas in an understandable and accessible fashion for the general public. I’ve been writing op-eds for a long time. (I also enjoy teaching students how to write them.) As a result of those, I started getting inquiries about doing more regular commentaries, especially radio and television interviews and to do things like interview authors who write on topics I comment on.

Asst Prof Sneha: I have always wanted to make academic work more accessible to an interested public. As someone who has found – and still does find – much of academic writing a bit insular and hard to follow, it gives me joy and satisfaction to do the work of demystification or “translation” through which complex arguments can be communicated in simpler and equally evocative ways in conversation. I also just really like getting to know how academics go about doing their work and initiatives such as NBN and Ethnographic Marginalia have introduced me to so many cool people! Ultimately, building an intellectual community is a really rewarding task and it is really thrilling to be contribute to that in some minor way.

What are some of the topics you tend to discuss at these engagements?

Assoc Prof Ho: The key idea is how can residents within the neighbourhood be mobilised. The Toa Payoh East Zone project enabled a discussion of informal sources of partnerships between neighbours in looking out for one another.

Dr Craig: My speciality these days tends to be on geopolitics as well as United States (US) politics. I routinely do the Washington Report segment on the local MoneyFM89.3 radio and that is about US politics as it affects the world, so that’s a lot about things like US-China relations, the war in Ukraine, the US debt ceiling. I’ll usually do live commentary for CNA on things like the US President’s State of the Union Message or presidential elections as the results come in. Then for international outlets, it’s a bit more on how issues in Asia may affect the rest of the world. In a sense, this is translating politics in ways that make what’s going on intelligible to different audiences. To do that, you have to understand what audiences likely know about and care about. Also, I’ve been doing some speaking on gender issues, particularly around what the green transition means for gender parity. That comes from a project I did in conjunction with a gender equity non-profit and LinkedIn.

Asst Prof Sneha: As mentioned earlier, the books that academics have recently written; their processes around research and writing; research ethics and methodology; their newer projects and engagements; at times, how their teaching informs their research etc.

How has your involvement in this shaped your teaching and/or research?

Assoc Prof Ho: Opportunities such as the Toa Payoh project offshoot allow me to teach my students lessons on how neighbourly relations can be mobilised to create a strong platform for mutual help. My students had a chance to see the needs of the elderly poor and more importantly see how they are able to collaborate to solve these needs. Significantly, social service agencies help with the fostering of these networks. Through the services they provide such as food delivery, they were able to connect residents with each other on a regular basis. Students learn concepts in Urban Studies that relate to neighbourly relations, place belonging, the role of social service agencies and social health and support at the neighbourhood scale.

Dr Craig: I think this kind of public engagement work and research are mutually beneficial and reinforcing. For example, some of my academic work centres on internal party politics and candidate selection processes in the US and that helps inform the things I talk about to general audiences, but the research I do for a show or opinion piece often makes it back into my more scholarly work. I was recently on a panel on deglobalisation and political realignment with some bankers, policy makers and diplomats. Some of the things they talked about gave me a fresh perspective on that topic that will likely influence the way I talk about the topic in other settings.

Asst Prof Sneha: I find that teaching and podcast interviews are similar in that they are most effective when big, complex ideas can be broken down into graspable concepts and tangible examples. Doing these podcast interviews has helped me work through texts with a view to how students might be reading them. Similarly, teaching for over three years has given me a sense of the kinds of questions students find interesting or useful in getting to know more about and that has been helpful in figuring out what to ask authors of new books.