Economic migration is integral to processes of globalization, with large numbers of the global poor moving across borders in search of employment in the face of structural adjustment programs and large-scale displacement of the poor from traditional forms of livelihood. One such group are foreign domestic workers (FDWs). In this culture-centered study, we listen to the voices of FDWs in Singapore to understand the key meanings of health held by this group of migrant workers as they negotiate living and working in Singapore. Through the representation of FDW voices at sites where they have previously been excluded, we hope to co-create participatory spaces in national discourse so that policies and interventions can be developed to address the health needs of FDWs. The results represented in this essay are part of a larger project engaging the CCA to foster communicative platforms for structural transformation.

Smart Nation is a key initiative of Singapore to move toward digitalization of its industries including healthcare. The complex negotiations of aging amid Smart Nation are addressed in this paper, where we study the challenges faced to adapt the elderly for the digital revolution while ensuring dignified aging. While the healthcare industry accelerates its study and use of health technologies to improve diagnostics, treatment, and the quality of life of those in the aging category, the elderly socially construct these technological insertions that challenge the dominant understandings of what these technologies can do for their health outcomes. The study reveals re-constructions of these technological insertions through the voice of the elderly in their negotiations with health technologies in their everyday lives. Here, narratives reveal key themes that proliferate technology negotiation as barriers to everyday lived experiences.

On 8 December 2013, a group of foreign construction workers (FCWs) were involved in a confrontation with the police in the Little India neighbourhood of Singapore after the death of a worker in a vehicle accident. The confrontation was framed as the 'Little India riot' in The Straits Times, the most widely read newspaper in Singapore, often referred to as a state apparatus serving as a tool for nation building. Drawing upon framing theory, we analyze articles published in The Straits Times covering the 'Little India riot' over the period of a year. Our thematic analysis suggests that the newspaper framed the workers as 'rioters', connecting the riot to alcohol and street justice as a trait of the Indian culture, offering a cultural explanation for the underlying factors stirring and shaping the confrontation. The framing of the workers as criminals also justified increased surveillance and control of FCWs as safety measures to preserve Singapore's security and national image as an investment and tourism destination. The news stories also presented multiple viewpoints regarding the handling of the riot and subsequent policy responses, allowing room for contesting opinions in the mediated public sphere. Left absent in the frames were the alternative narratives grounded in the voices of the FCWs.

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Hegemonic Open Science, emergent from the circuits of knowledge production in the Global North and serving the economic interests of platform capitalism, systematically erase the voices of the subaltern margins from the Global South and the Southern margins inhabiting the North. Framed within an overarching emancipatory narrative of creating access for and empowering the margins through data exchanged on the global free market, hegemonic Open Science processes co-opt and erase Southern epistemologies, working to create and reproduce new enclosures of extraction that serve data colonialism-capitalism. In this essay, drawing on our ongoing negotiations of community-led culture-centered advocacy and activist strategies that resist the racist, gendered, and classed structures of neocolonial knowledge production in the metropole in the North, we attend to Southern practices of Openness that radically disrupt the whiteness of hegemonic Open Science. These decolonizing practices foreground data sovereignty, community ownership, and public ownership of knowledge resources as the bases of resistance to the colonial-capitalist interests of hegemonic Open Science.