Steering Committee
Tracey Skelton is Principal Investigator of the Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster (GSRC) and an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Her research and teaching are both driven by a political commitment to social justice and working towards fairer societies and hence a better world. Her early research and published work focused on the Caribbean, with a particular focus on the island of Montserrat. This led her into work on development and globalisation; culture and land attachments; and the power relations of race, gender and sexuality. In 1998 she co-edited Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures (Routledge) which became the seminal text in young people’s geographies. Since then she has gone from strength to strength in relation to her contribution to the development and international expansion of the sub-discipline Children’s and Young People’s Geographies. At NUS she has been able to expand into new research areas. These include comparative work on Asian cities; international development volunteering; and young people and un/employment.
Mie Hiramoto is Deputy Principal Investigator of the GSRC and an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at NUS.
She earned her PhD in linguistics from the University of Hawai’i (2006). Her research interests are sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, in particular, contact linguistics (e.g., Japanese spoken outside Japan and Singapore English) as well as language, gender, and sexuality (e.g., mediation and medialization; Asian masculinity). Some of her recent research papers appeared in World Englishes (2019), Language in Society (2019), Social Semiotics (2020), Language and Communication (2020), and Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages (2020). She serves as co-editor-in-chief for Gender and Language, and associate editor for Journal of Language and Sexuality among other journal-related services.
Michelle H. S. Ho (pronouns: she, her) is an Assistant Professor of Feminist and Queer Cultural Studies in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore (NUS). She holds a Ph.D. in cultural studies and Advanced Graduate Certificate in women’s and gender studies from Stony Brook University (SUNY). She is currently at work on a monograph on trans/gender, markets, and the economy through an ethnographic study of josō (male-to-female crossdressing) and dansō (female-to-male crossdressing) cafe-and-bars in contemporary Tokyo, Japan.
Rebecca Lurie Starr is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at NUS. She studies variation phenomena in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, and Irish Gaelic. She is primarily interested in the acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge among children, particularly those growing up in a bilingual environment. Currently she is leading the Voices of Children in Singapore project investigating how children here learn about language variation. She is also beginning work on the Singapore Multilingual Corpus, which seeks to document the language use patterns of multilingual Singaporeans, including documentation of Southern Chinese varieties such as Cantonese and Hokkien. She also studies teachers’ stylistic variation in the classroom, sociolinguistic variation in the media, and the sociophonetic construction of style, as well as sociolinguistic variation in Singapore more generally.
YUEN Shu Min teaches gender and sexuality at the Department of Japanese Studies, National University of Singapore. Her research interests include transgender studies, popular culture, and contemporary Japanese society. Her recent works have appeared in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (forthcoming), Asian Anthropology (2020), and Routledge Handbook of Japanese Media (2018). She is currently working on a monograph on female-to-male transgender history, media and community in Japan.
