Speakers Bios & Abstracts
Keynote Speakers
Inequality as an Analytical Lens: How Should We Think About Inequality in Our Scholarship?
How should we think inequality in our scholarship?
The problem of inequality has come to the forefront of global public consciousness. For scholars in the humanities, social and population sciences, this attention and interest presents opportunities. Within our disciplines, there are significant traditions for the study of inequality—how it works, whom it affects, how it is reproduced. It is also the case, however, that inequality is frequently treated as contextual backdrop or mere empirical phenomenon without being the center of critical analytic attention. Scholars can still do more to develop and enhance understandings about contemporary conditions of inequality. In this lecture, I explore the question of how scholarship can better center inequality as a critical, analytical lens; what happens to knowledge production when we do so; and what is at stake when we neglect to. On subjects that matter particularly to demographers—family formation and dissolution, fertility, migration, health, ageing—I hope to open up conversation about how research could take different forms and directions when inequality is a central analytic lens.
Associate Professor & Provost’s Chair in Sociology, Nanyang Technological University
Assoc Prof Teo You Yenn
A/P Teo You Yenn is an Associate Professor and Provost’s Chair in Sociology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research focuses on poverty and inequality, governance and policy, gender and class inequalities. Her ongoing projects focus on care/welfare regimes and minimum income standards, examining the questions of what basic needs are in contemporary Singapore and what incomes people need to meet basic standards of living. She is also the author of Neoliberal Morality in Singapore: How family policies make state and society (Routledge, 2011) and This is What Inequality Looks Like (Ethos Books, 2018). She is a founding editor of AcademiaSG, which promotes Singapore studies and encourage critical public discourse about the state of intellectual life in Singapore. More information about her work at: https://teoyouyenn.sg