I am Lecturer at NUS College of the National University of Singapore. Prior to this, I was Research Fellow at Asia Research Institute (ARI) in 2019-2022 and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Division of Social Sciences at Yale-NUS College in 2017-2019. I stay with ARI as an Associate of the Asian Migration Cluster. I completed a DPhil at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, as a recipient of the Oxford Clarendon and St Peter’s Diggle Scholarship. I received a Master of Social Sciences in 2012 and a Bachelor of Social Sciences (Honours, 1st class) with a major in Geography and minor in Gender Studies in 2010, both from the National University of Singapore. I currently serve as member on the Editorial Board of Global Networks and Children’s Geographies.
Born into a tiny kampung in the northwestern part of Singapore, I spent the first five years of my childhood playing hide-and-seek at the cemeteries and catching tadpoles in canals. I was one of the rare few kids in my generation who has lived a kampung life. Fast forward to today, I still chase excitement only now it’s through green corridor hikes, honing my green fingers, and cooking. My most unforgettable learning experience as undergraduate (in NUS) is living for a week in Chiang Rai’s forest community, trying to survive from army mosquitoes and on a diet of forest greens while studying animism’s role in conservation and livelihoods. A twist of fate took me from a C in A-level Geography to a PhD in the very same field. Now, I’m back in NUS and an advocate of the motto: It’s okay to try and fail, but not okay to fail to try.
See my contribution to scholarship at:
chengyien. 