FASS Staff Profile

DR JENNIFER ESTES
SENIOR LECTURER
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

Appointment:
SENIOR LECTURER
Office:
AS1 #04-32
Email:
socjee@nus.edu.sg
Tel:
Fax:
Homepage:
http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/socjee/
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Brief Introduction

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a rural community, my research examines how changes in Cambodia’s political economy shape the daily lives of young people and their families. My current book project, entitled Betting on Education: The Costs of Schooling for Cambodian Youth, focuses on the economic logics that students must adopt in order to complete secondary school as they strive to gain a foothold in the emerging middle class. I hold a PhD in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

As an educator, my overarching goal is for students to gain critical new perspectives on the world around them. I challenge students to question their assumptions about what is “normal” or “natural," and I help them mobilize anthropological insights and methods to examine the structures of power that shape the lives of people around the globe. I was a recipent of the NUS Annual Teaching Excellence Award 2023, as well as the Faculty of Arts and Social Science Annual Teaching Excellence Award in 2021-2023. I am also a current fellow of the NUS Teaching Academy. 


Teaching Areas

At NUS, I teach or have taught the following courses:

- Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World (GEH1056/GEC1020)

- Sociology of Work (SC2202)

- Gender Studies (SC2220)

- Sociology of Education (SC3204)

- Sociology of Migration (SC4210)

I will also co-teach Representing Live(s): Research, Performance, and Stories (HS2913) starting in Sem 2 of AY2023-2024. This intersiciplinary module brings together approches from anthropology and theatre studies. 

In all of my modules, students use the lens of anthropology to critically analyze the structures of power that create the vast inequalities we see today. Active learning is central to my teaching, so both lectures and tutorials are structured around student discussions. Drawing on feminist pedagogical approaches, I create opportunities for students to share their perspectives and reflect on how module content applies to their own lives. Students hone their abilities to evaluate academic texts through close engagement with ethnographies. In my modules at the 2K level and above, students also develop their qualitative research and analytic skills by conducting their own independent fieldwork projects.


Research Interests

Youth; education; class inequality; the financialization of everyday life; agrarian transformations; Cambodia.


Publications

ARTICLES IN JOURNALS

  • "The Underside of Microfinance: Performance Indicators and Informal Debt in Cambodia," co-authored with W. Nathan Green, Theavy Chhom, and Reach Mony. 2023. Development and Change. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12778.
  • "A High Price to Pay: Weddings and Waithood in Cambodia." 2022. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1080/14442213.2022.2132356
  • "Translocal Precarity: Labor and Social Reproduction in Cambodia," co-authored with W. Nathan Green. 2022. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 112(6): 1726-1740. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2021.2015280
  • “Precarious Debt: Microfinance Subjects and Intergenerational Dependency in Cambodia,” co-authored with W. Nathan Green. 2019. Antipode 51(1): 129-147. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12413

BOOK REVIEWS

  • Review of Development on Loan: Microcredit and Marginalization in Rural China by Nicholas Loubere. 2021. Asian Journal of Social Science 49(3): 176.
  • Review of At the Edges of States: Dynamics of State Formation in the Indonesian Borderlands by Michael Eilenberg and Anarchic Solidarity: Autonomy, Equality, and Fellowship in Southeast Asia edited by Thomas Gibson and Kenneth Sillander. 2015. The Journal of Asian Studies 74(1): 239-241.
  • Review of We Didn’t Start the Fire: My Struggle for Democracy in Cambodia by Sam Rainsy with David Whitehouse. 2014. The Journal of Asian Studies 73(4): 1162-1163.

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