The contemporary global context is one of intense wealth, income inequality and narrowing social mobility. Class privilege or disadvantage and their reproduction shape people’s wellbeing in profound ways. In this lecture, Teo You Yenn will look at how scholars have studied the effects of class inequality on everyday lives, with particular focus on how class matters in shaping the experience of work, family, and the connections between the two.

Speaker Biography: 

Teo You Yenn is Associate Professor, Provost’s Chair, and Head of Sociology at the Nanyang Technological University. Her research focuses on poverty and inequality, governance and state-society dynamics, gender, and class. She is the author of Neoliberal Morality in Singapore: How Family Policies make State and Society (Routledge, 2011) and This is What Inequality Looks Like (Ethos Books, 2018). Her current research focuses on cross-class comparisons of work and family, basic needs and minimum income standards.

Moderator Biography:

Emily Soon is a Lecturer of English Literature in the College of Integrative Studies and School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University. Her research focuses on cross-cultural literary engagement between Asia and Europe in the premodern and modern eras. Her work on cultural inclusivity and student Shakespeare performances in late-colonial Singapore has appeared in Shakespeare Survey. Her research on early modern literature has been published in England’s Asian Renaissance and is forthcoming in Modern Philology. In addition to Big Questions, she teaches the modules ‘Asia and World Literature: Beyond Orientalism’ and ‘Imagining the Self: Literature, Ethnicity and Gender in Asia’.