FASS Staff Profile

DR IVAN KWEK ENG TAI
LECTURER
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

Appointment:
LECTURER
Office:
AS1/03-24
Email:
ivankwek@nus.edu.sg
Tel:
65166419
Fax:
Homepage:
http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/soc/faculty/fellows.htm
Tabs

Brief Introduction

Ivan Kwek is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology & Anthropology, NUS.  Trained as a media anthropologist at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Univ. of London), and with a prior background as a TV current affairs and documentary producer, Ivan has worked on the ethnography of media production at Suria, the minority Malay-language television channel in Singapore.  His research remains focused on the so-called Malay worlds as they relate to, not just media and ethnicity, but also spaces, memories, and future-making.  As an educator, he has taught visual ethnography and visual culture, race and ethnicity, media and popular culture, art and cultural production as well as the gateway module to the newly launched Anthropology major.  


Teaching Areas

 

  • Introduction to Anthropology

  • Visual Ethnography

  • Race & Ethnicity

  • Visual Culture

  • Media Anthropology

  • Sociology & Anthropology of the Arts - Voice, Power & Policy, 


Current Research

The Trouble with Conversations: Discursive Production of Race and Ethnicity in Singapore

The project looks at how issues of race and ethnicity are discursively constituted and managed

 

Polite Remembering

What happened to the pain of eviction from one's homelands?  The project reconsiders the nostalgia often expressed in the remembering of the life in the Southern Islands in a number of memory-making projects and the silence behind their experiences of displacement.      


Research Interests

Everyday forms, practices and experiences of social inclusion and exclusion, difference, and visibility, particularly in the context of Malay and Indonesian societies

The discursive control of race & ethnicity in the Singapore context, with particular attention to quaestions of representation, space, social memory and affect. 

Media Anthropology & Visual Research Methodologies

Anthropology of the Future


Publications

CHAPTERS IN BOOKS

  • ‘How far to the global? Producing television at the margins as lived experiences’ In Global media, culture, and identity, eds. Rohit Chopra and Radhika Gajjala. (New York: Routledge, 2011).

    ‘Malayness as mindset: when television producers imagine their audiences as Malay’. In Melayu: politics, poetics, and paradoxes of ethnicity, eds. Maznah Mohamad and Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied.  (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011).

Other Information

Profile as media producer

Prior to joining NUS, Ivan was a television producer, initially in current affairs, and later moving on to head the documentaries unit at what was then called Television Corporation of Singapore (now, Mediacorp). He left the station in 1996 to work independently, still producing and directing documentaries for the local station.

By 1999, informed by his reading of participatory research strategies, he tried to rework his practice as a professional media producer in ways that were theoretically informed. In a four-part series on older persons, for example, he tried ceding some of the directorial control to the subjects of the documentary, sometimes to the annoyance of the funding agency.  The creative process was in turn the object of a parallel research project entitled Televising the Aged. 

Issues related to the theory/practice divide and the conditions for a critical intervention continue to inform Ivan's research agenda.

 

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