Unease: Life in Singapore Families
🌟 To celebrate the publication of Unease, we are releasing a special edition cover that features a glossy title 🌟 Available while stocks last. Pre-order your copy now! Order by 23 March to receive by 4 April
Register here for the book launch on 11 April, 2-4pm @ Common Ground Civic Centre (Auditorium)
In Singapore, a loudly ‘pro-family’ society, why is work-life balance so elusive? And why are parents so uneasy? What accounts for this gap between the lived reality and ideal narrative of Singapore families?
Sociologist and bestselling author Teo You Yenn turns her eyes to the contours and rhythms of life inside families, exploring how ‘kiasu’ parents are made and investigating the ways in which inequality marks life in contemporary Singapore. Drawing from in-depth interviews with parents from all walks of life, Unease examines how social structures, individual strategies and common practices come to produce Singaporean ‘cultures’ of doing family.
An incisive exposé of how the logics of hierarchy, competition and unequal worth infect ordinary people’s lives, Unease asks what these cost parents, children and the values we hold as a society. And what possibilities are there for living differently?
Unease: Life in Singapore Families
Slide to see
Pre-Order (Order by 23 March to receive by 4 April)
$30.00 SGD
Reviews
"In this powerful and persuasive book, Teo You Yenn challenges Singapore’s self-image as a pro-family society. She reveals the contradictions of a state that champions family life yet often overlooks the stress, anxiety, exhaustion, and gender and class inequalities that define it. Kiasu parenting, she argues, is less a personal choice and more a response to structural conditions and policies. If Unease leaves you unsettled, then it has succeeded in prompting us to confront the difficult questions it raises." —Donald Low, Professor of Practice,Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
"This is a book that asks us to look closely at how responsibility and care are practised in everyday life and what we quietly pass on and pass over in the process. It articulates with particular force the gap between the values we profess out loud and the quieter logics we reproduce through habit, silence and structure, giving shape to tensions many of us live with but rarely have language for. Written with striking intellectual precision and a profound attentiveness to lived experience, this is scholarship that makes room for the heart without sacrificing rigour, and for rigour without losing the human. This work is incisive, intimate and quietly heartbreaking in what it helps us see. It asks, with quiet insistence, what we are really raising ourselves, and our children, to value, and why that question matters more than ever now." —Pooja Nansi, Poet
"The idea that the family is a basic unit of society is widely held, and not just in Asian societies. Indeed, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the United Nations in 1948, includes this article: “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State”. On the one hand, familial responsibilities and obligations are extolled as foundational for social stability and economic success. On the other hand, beneath this idealised veneer, the burdens and costs of parenting are unevenly distributed amid unequal social conditions and a culture of individualist meritocracy. Teo You Yenn’s Unease is both a model of qualitative social research, learning deeply from the lived experiences of wage workers in Singapore, and a meditation on the disjuncture between ideal and reality and how we can imagine a good society based on relationships of mutuality and solidarity." —Kwok Kian Woon, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Nanyang Technological University
"Teo You Yenn does it again. Unease represents what good social science research should look like, marrying analytical sharpness with social consciousness. In her typically accessible writing style, she details the lived realities of some Singaporean families which are often glossed over or ignored when macro data is put forth. Statistics do not always capture the complex lives of individuals. This book fills that gap well, reminding us that human beings should never be reduced to mere numbers. Prof Teo takes the experiences of ordinary Singaporeans seriously. More of us should. Her impassioned call for Singapore to engage in self-introspection on ideas such as meritocracy should be genuinely considered by those in power and everyone else, as evidently, not everyone benefits equally from the system. Hopefully, those who read the book will be filled with some unease, realising that for many people, life is not as comfortable as the stats suggest. Singaporeans should indeed be, in her words, “allowed ambivalence, contradictory feelings, and critical responses to our own lives and the city.” —Walid Jumblatt Abdullah, Associate Professor School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University; Author of Why Palestine?: Reflections From Singapore
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