V1i9 by The Octant

Issue 09: 11 March 2014 Chief Editor: Indrani Kaliyaperumal Editors: Joyan Tan and Spandana Bhattacharya

Upcoming Events

11 Mar - Public Lecture by Brian Garsten Rethinking Solitude - Riady LT 32 - 5pm Moses Tan & Melissa Tsang - 1st floor commons 8.30pm 12 Mar - Public lecture by Deborah Davis Replacing the Urban:Rural Divide - CAPT Audi 5pm 13 Mar - Public lecture by Amy Hungerford Wallace Stevens - Riady LT 53 14 Mar - Rector's Tea Panel discussion by Bryan Garsten, Deborah Davis and Amy Hungerford, , Pericles Lewis and Charles Bailyn - 1st Floor commons - 5.45pm 15 Mar - Rector's event - Romeo & Juliet Esplanade - 8pm 17 Mar - Arvind Mehrota Reading - SR 1 & 2 6.30pm 18 Mar - Rector's Tea - Hokkaido students cultural exchange - first floor commons - 12.30pm 20 Mar - Rector's Teas – (1) Nicole Seah - First floor commons - 6pm (2) Tokyo Philharmonic - Esplanade - 8pm

VICE-RECTOR’S NOTE This week marks a momentous feat in our College history with the toppingoff ceremony of our new campus high up on RC2. It is exciting to see the progress made towards our new home, with new buildings going up almost every week, and the Yale-NUS skyline becoming ever more defined. This week we will also have a series of guests on campus from our founding institutions: Yale and NUS. You will have many opportunities to interact with them: in the classroom, in Rector’s Teas, in the dining hall, or simply walking around campus. I hope you take this opportunity to share with them all the great work you’ve been doing over the course of this academic year. They’ve all heard great things about our students and now they’ll get to meet you in person! It is quite remarkable to think how far the College has come in such a short amount of time. The daunting task of implementing our Common Curriculum is well under way and based on my conversations with many of you, the results are very satisfying at all levels. As this semester winds down, you will have an opportunity to learn more about our electives for semester three at the upcoming Electives Fair and Major Informational. This event will take place on April 21 during Advising Week and you should definitely not miss it. Faculty will be on hand to answer questions about plans of study and requirements for the various Yale-NUS majors. Another important event is happening in the Admissions Office. The Admissions team is busy at work selecting the next cohort of Yale-NUS students. This is another landmark as we will double the size of our student body and have another batch of talented and enthusiastic students from around the world in RC4. Many of them will be here during this coming weekend’s Yale-NUS Open Day or in April for the Experience Yale-NUS (EYW) weekend. Once again, show the Yale-NUS spirit and make everyone feel welcome. To quote the great Sister Sledge: We are family! Here is the latest issue of PANOPT. Enjoy.

Winging the Cuff off the Top of your Head The great Chinese comedian Mozi once said, “Human nature is inherently funny.” [citation needed] You probably don’t realise it, but you are improvising humour all the time in your everyday conversations, whenever you drop a pop culture reference, whenever you quote an internet meme, whenever you make a terrible pun by mangling a professor’s name. There’s no script, no rehearsal; just instant comedy. Well, we here at the Improv Comedy Conglomerate (patent pending) are the brave men and women who dared to leave their dignity behind and take that inherent hilarity to the stage. We play structured games but make all the content up on the spot, taking inspiration from audience prompts and suggestions. Yes, it’s scary; but it’s also exciting, exhilarating, and epic. Opening Act was the College’s (and also our) very first show which was pure improv from start to finish. Hosted in the intimate setting of Seminar Room 1 and 2, we sold out all seventy seats, and still had people crowding the standing area at the back. For an hour and a half, we entertained our audience with forgetful debaters who had to rely on their teammates’ charade prompts; a frustrating safari with assistants who only had two-line vocabularies; a Snow White who held a press conference to announce her pregnancy; and the alleged famous last words of Dracula. After gruelling rounds of competition, the Clementi Woodlands outplayed the Raffles Redhills to win the first ever Improv Comedy Conglomerate show. The team was awarded with a mastercraft homemade trophy to commemorate the momentous occasion. But victory was truly inconsequential, as the Alien vs. Predator motto confirms: Whichever team loses, the audience wins. The Improv Comedy Conglomerate (batteries not included) also performed with the NUS Improvables on 8 March, opening for local stand-up comedian Kumar. We will also be having another improv show in April, so look out for that! Photo credits to Chris Tee

KNOW YOUR PROFESSOR:

Professor Jane Jacobs

Professor Jane Jacobs Professor Jacobs obtained her BA (Hons) and MA at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She then took her PhD at University College London (awarded 1991), and examined heritage and community-based opposition to large-scale urban redevelopment in rapidly changing London.

What work do you do as the Director of Social Sciences in Yale-NUS? I have three key jobs as Director. The first is to make the entire faculty in the Division of Social Sciences happy. To make an academic happy, you have to make sure that they have the right conditions to do their research, to teach well and not be under stress, and to make sure that they are informed of College procedures and expectations! I also make sure that we have something convivial happening every now and then, like a bit of wine and cheese! The second part of my job is the Annual Review process, which is where I talk with Faculty in my Division about how they are doing with teaching and research, and what they might need to make sure they can do their job of teaching and research to their best ability. The third thing I do is that I help the College to grow the Division. I also Photo credits to play a part in the committees that search for new faculty. I consult with my Heads of Professor Jacobs Studies in the Division to work out which areas we want to expand in, and work with the search committee (which is part Yale, part NUS, and part Yale-NUS) to search for new faculty. That includes entertaining them when they come, helping to organize workshops, and communicate to them how great Yale-NUS is. Will CSI be taught differently next academic year for the first years? Yes, it will be taught a little differently. Through our experiences in the past semester, we learned that one-week units are of no use – there is not enough depth. We might also cut down on the annotations. We think that the thematic topics do work, so we will keep that but change some of them. We are going to make Religion longer, we may add Education. We will keep Markets, Family and Race, and we will think about the others more carefully. How is Modern Social Thought different from, and built upon CSI from last semester? CSI was about empirical things, actual events, and phenomena understood academically; we only touched upon theory every now and then. Modern Social Thought will get us more involved in the theoretical questions. We learned a little about structure and agency in CSI, but we will definitely learn more about what these mean in relation to Modern Social Thought. We will learn how to better understand power through certain theoretical models. We also tackle head-on the big social thinkers. However, it so happens that the big social thinkers are the three white men – Marx, Weber, Durkheim. So our biggest challenge so far has been to go beyond these three white men. How do we include feminist perspectives, perspectives from the non-west, postcolonial perspectives, and the subaltern perspectives? So what we will do a lot in MST is talk about Marx, Weber, Durkheim and look at voices who have responded to them and challenged the conventional focus of Modern Social Thought. What are some of your favorite moments and most challenging moments so far in teaching the elective ‘Divided Cities’? I had my most memorable moment the Wednesday before term break when we went on a Chinatown field trip. There was a majority of Singaporean students in the class so I was very nervous because I thought there would be nothing new that I could bring them. As it turned out, we visited the Urban Redevelopment Authority and had a great tour guide leading us around. I also gave each student a quote from various city builders, conservationists, politicians, Tourism Board people, from the 1980s to the 1990s and this formed part of the tour commentary as well. This was the first time I taught about Chinatown in Singapore; I was nervous but it went really well because my class is so great. In a course like Divided Cities, there is a very serious message: that cities are divided – there are rich and poor, haves and havenots, people in power and disempowered people. I think the greatest challenge then is to make sure the students feel that there is some hope and it’s not just all a negative story. What research are you currently doing? I have just finished a book, and I’m still in the recovery stage. The book title is Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture, which is co-authored by my husband and myself. My husband is an academic architect, my PhD was on architecture in society and we came to know each other through that. Our book argues that architects as professionals assume an identity of creative agents and designers. So many architects design buildings with the aim of expressing creative identity in buildings they hope will be permanent and durable. We believe that this is no longer a sufficient concept for architecture in this day and age. Buildings get demolished all the time, the average life of a building in most places is about 25 years, and architects designing buildings and imagining them to be in place forever is out of step with reality. This has a whole set of ramifications – what happens to the design of buildings if those designing them know they will end? How do you design for the end of the building, for the change of use of the building, and how do you design a building such that it is not an environmental catastrophe when it ends? Architects like to imagine that they are creating a building so good that it will last forever. We want architects to think about their buildings in a wider cycle of life and death. Recently, I have also been doing some work in Jakarta to make my research more connected to the region. I have been doing research on people who have been relocated and rehoused from Kampungs to multi-storey housing. All these are in pilot stage and focus on housing and modernization in South East Asia. What are some of the difficulties you face when trying to publish research papers or a book that you write? The greatest challenge you can have when writing a book with your husband is that the co-author is…well, your husband! This produces a set of issues, such as the boundary between work and home, making sure that the dinner table conversation doesn’t revolve around the book. That would be fine, but we have a 12-year old daughter who was getting bored with those conversations. The other thing when you work with your partner is that very strangely, your research drops down in 2 priority and you need to work harder in communicating with each other. You need to remind each other to set meetings and deadlines because it’s much easier to imagine that it’s all going to happen in passing.

Intercollegiate Games 2014

The Battle of the Colleges!

“I remember the moments when our badminton team displayed such a high level of enthusiasm and positivity during the round robin matches. We were trailing behind by quite a lot yet our spirits remained high. Sometimes, the girls in our team even smiled and cheered for our opponents. Such moments were heartwarming and I felt that we displayed great sportsmanship.” – Samuel Lum

“Instead of the winning moments or the grueling finals match in Captains Ball, I remember most fondly the last Floorball match against CAPT where both teams knew that the outcome would not change our overall standing. Halfway through, we mutually decided to field all-girls teams on both sides and just have fun. It was a sweet ending to the whole ICG for me, since the ultimate goal was friendship and bonding between, not just within, teams!” - Zhiwen

“My most challenging moment during the ICGs was being so close to winning the cup, yet coming up agonisingly short at the end. However, we did the best that we could and I am so proud of our school for the remarkable effort and dedication we have put in towards the ICGs.” - Subhas

“The most challenging fact was that we have a small student body and the other colleges drew players from all 4 years quite like the Spartans who sacrificed themselves defending Sparta from the Persian army.” – Yao Hui

“By the time the next ICG rolls around, we would have a whole new batch of juniors. Training for ICG will be a good opportunity for interbatch bonding and nurturing the Yale-NUS spirit. I definitely also hope that Yale-NUS maintains its good showing and exceeds expectations.” - Amelia

“My most memorable moments were helping out with the closing ceremony and joining the badminton team in the last minute. However, it was rather challenging juggling both La La Luna and ICG, which were both on the same weekend. Looking forward, I believe that in the next ICG, despite the increase in the student body, we shouldn’t be complacent and should aim to win it!” -Jevon