FASS Staff Profile

CHUA HUI CHING EMILY
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

Appointment:
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
Office:
AS1 04-23
Email:
socchce@nus.edu.sg
Tel:
Fax:
Homepage:
http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/socchce/
Tabs

Brief Introduction

Emily Chua is a social and cultural anthropologist, working at the intersections of digital technology, media, capital and authoritarian state politics in China and Singapore. 

Her first book, The Currency of Truth: Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China's Digital Era (University of Michigan Press, 2023), draws on long-term fieldwork among newspaper journalists in Guangzhou and Beijing, to argue that contemporary news articles should be thought of less as truth-claims written to and for a public, than as a currency that industry players make and use to create agreements, build connections, and protect and advance their positions against one another. The book is available in print and open access, here: https://www.press.umich.edu//12573170.

Her current book project explores the digital transformation of money in Singapore. Through ethnographic engagements with financial app-using retail investors, venture capital-seeking startup founders, and data-deploying fintech developers, it asks how our remaking of money is remaking us. 

Emily's articles are published in journals including JRAI, Ethnography, Science, Technology and Society, Asian Studies Review and China Quarterly. Her research has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the UC Berkeley Institute of East Asian Studies, among others. She earned her PhD in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

 


Teaching Areas

 

AY 2022/23 Semester 2

SC3101: Social Thought and Theory

 

Previous semesters

SC2221: Humans and Natures

SC3101: Social Thought and Theory

SC4202: Reading Ethnographies

SC6216: The Anthropological Perspective

SC6223: The Government of Life in Contemporary Capitalism

 

Teaching Awards

Annual Teaching Excellence Award (2021/22)

Faculty Teaching Excellence Award (2021/22)

Faculty Teaching Excellence Award (2020/21)

Faculty Teaching Excellence Award (2016/17)

 


Research Interests

China, Singapore

Anthropology of news and journalism

Digital media and communications

Media technologies and cultures

Political culture in authoritarian states

Socialism, late-socialism, post-socialism and capitalism

Anthropology of money and markets

Technology and entrepreneurship (aka "Technopreneurship")

Startup culture

"The future"


Publications

BOOKS/MONOGRAPHS AUTHORED

ARTICLES IN JOURNALS

CHAPTERS IN BOOKS

  • 2020. "The Invisible Electorate: Political Campaign Participation as the Production of an Alternative National Space," in Hard State, Soft City: The Urban Imaginative Field in Singapore, Chung S and Douglas M (eds.), Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048544004-014
  • 2015. “The Changing Role of the Press in China’s Political Communications,” in China’s Social-Political Reforms: Evolutionary or Revolutionary (Singapore: Civil Service College).

Talks and Conferences

 

Invited talks

2020    “From Propaganda to Publicness,” Columbia University, Modern East Asia: China Seminar

2018    “Representing the other: Ethnography as a mode of knowledge production,” Hwa Chong International School, Theory of Knowledge Seminar

2017    “From Xuanchuan to Xuanchuan: The Unmarked Transition from Propaganda to Publicity in China’s News Media”, L’ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris

2017    “From Xuanchuan to Xuanchuan: The Unmarked Transition from Propaganda to Publicity in China’s News Media”, East Asia Institute, Singapore

2015    “The Problem of the Chinese Press”, East Asia Institute, Singapore

 

Conference presentations

2022    “Financial Markets and Imagined Lives: How Stock Trading Apps Work as an Interface with the World,” Australian Anthropological Society Conference, panel on Markets for Life: Threats and Supports in Zones of Economic Transition

2022    “9 out of 10 will fail: The Startup as a Time out of our Financialized Times,” American Anthropological Association Meeting, panel on Money, Future and Values in Asia

2022    "Trading Apps to Secure my Future,” East Asian Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, panel on Ethnographies of Uncertainty: Risk, anxiety and hope in Asia

2019    “Startup as a Way of Being,” Interrogating Innovation workshop, Nanyang Technological University

2017    “Navigating the Newsmaker’s Jianghu”, Australian Anthropological Society Meeting, panel on The politics of truth after the fact: Shifting states in a post-fact world

2017    "The Cult of the Technopreneur”, Industrial Revolution 4.0: Preparing for Disruptive Technologies in 21st Century Asia conference, Asia Research Institute, Singapore

2016    “Technopreneurship: New Futures from Asia”, East Asian Science Technology and Society Network Conference, Tsinghua University

2016    "How China’s Post-Mao Newsmakers Make the Mao Era”, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, panel on Re-imagining Socialism, Re-actualizing Communism

2016    “The Para-politics of Disalienation in Singapore’s General Elections”, On Cities and Citizenship conference, Singapore University of Design and Technology

2016    “The Invisible Electorate”, Hard State Soft City conference, Asia Research Institute, Singapore

2015    “The Changing Role of the Press in China’s Political Communications”, Third China Symposium, Civil Service College, Singapore

2014    “Towards a Method for Post-Mao China: Fieldwork among Textual Subjects,” 2nd Young China Scholars’ Conference, Hong Kong Baptist University

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