Thinking the (Im)Possibilities of Liberatory Education from Singapore: Positionalities, Ambivalences, and Hope(s)

Singapore is a small Southeast Asian island-nation – a highly ‘developed’ hyper-regulated non-western city-state. Reflecting on teaching experience at the National University of Singapore (NUS), the nation’s flagship institution, this paper analyzes the (im)possibilities of a liberatory education within the wider structures of globalized capitalist Eurocentric modernity/coloniality, and ways of moving beyond this. Specifically, I offer a series of instances, both within and outside the classroom at NUS, where students cognizant of extant structural violences and destruction contested and deconstructed arguments for pedagogies of radical liberation and posited a necessity of mastering the canons. Through this, they argued for their situated need to navigate extant systems, and consequently for pedagogies and a learning that equip them to do so. Rather than dismissing this, I suggest to take it seriously to analyse the conditions that make it (im)possible. Here, I focus on their racialization as non-white, their positioning of Singapore as a non-core country in global modernity/coloniality, and neoliberal state politics of precarity constantly manufacturing expendability. Complexly, these forces discipline students to envision themselves as always-already incapable of systemic change, but always-already hoping it comes from elsewhere. Delinking and refusal therefore emerge as impossible, to be replaced with negotiation with a telos of survival. The paper closes by raising questions about the possibility, risks, and ambivalences of teaching sociology in ways that work against the present and the place of hope and ambivalence within this.