You Yenn Teo - This Is What Inequality Looks Like

This book is a remarkable raritya vivid ethnography of the lives, dreams and disappointments of low-income Singaporeans, skillfully intertwined with the implicit and explicit mental ideologies, social structures and bureaucratic institutions that both bind and separate us from each other. Delivered in slender, evocative prose with insight and empathy, yet informed by analytical distance and infused with theoretical rigor, it shows that the lives of our often-forgotten fellow citizens reveal larger truths about ourselves and our society, and the nature of humanity in our affluent post-industrial state. The highly accessible narrative both touches the heart and engages the mind, and deserves to become the basis for a wideranging public discourse on the soul of our nation.
Linda Lim, Professor Emerita of Corporate Strategy and International Business at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

With courage, integrity and scientific tools, Teo You Yenn enters the hidden abode of inequality. Immersing herself in the underside of Singapore society, she makes the invisible visiblecontrasting the hardships and precarity of family life, schooling, parenting, housing among low-income residents with the taken-for-granted comforts of the middle class. She disrupts widely-held national mythologies, calling attention to the defects of Singapores welfare state and how these might be repaired. Sociology at its best!
Michael Burawoy, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley

This Is What Inequality Looks Like is a refreshing, provocative, eye-opening book that is written with passion and insight. Highly readable and accessible, it will make for stimulating reading for anyone interested in the problems of poverty and inequality in and beyond Singapore. Teos work is grounded in sociological sensitivity and shaped by three years of intimate interactions with Singapores poor. This book disrupts the image of Singapore as merely a place of prosperity and progress and points instead to the day-to-day experiences of Singapores disadvantaged residents, the challenges they face, and the embedded presumptions about them that undermine their access to assistance with dignity. Teo invites her readers to confront inequality head on and to consider where they fit into the social matrix. Singapores overly-simplistic discourses of social inclusion and the greater good, she argues, serve in fact to valorize the market and self-reliance at the expense of meaningful and transformative change aimed at reducing social inequalities.
Nicole Constable, Professor of Anthropology and Research Professor in the University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh

This Is What Inequality Looks Like is a masterfully crafted text. Consciously avoiding academic frames, Teo You Yenns ethically and politically grounded narrative unfolds through vignettes of lived experiences that stand in sharp, stark contrast to the dominant imaginings of Singaporeans as mobile, cosmopolitan, free, agentic, affluent global citizens. Drawing on everyday lives of individuals and families, privileging their voices through the choice of ethnographythe books chapters communicate the pathos and experiences of being poor and living under conditions of inequality in a cosmopolitan city-state. The books lens is focused critically on popular, academic and state discourses about Singapore society. The book is a much needed intervention in hitherto un-problematised, taken-for-granted conclusions about poverty (its absence and then its causes), about inequalities, about responsibilities of the state and social structures in Singaporeregnant amongst Singaporeansacademics included. The book will no doubt resonate globally and has obvious analytical reverberations that are delivered through the empirical richness of a veiled segment of everyday Singaporean lives. The book disturbs deliberately, asking difficult questions that demand considered moral responses, highlighting above all the role of institutional structures in producing the context for the unfolding of experiences of poverty and inequality. Teos voice, heard powerfully and honestly throughout the text, is a provocation; each page is etched with an inspiration and moral compulsion to engagean invitation that is impossible to resist.
Vineeta Sinha, Professor of Sociology, National University of Singapore

This is a remarkable book in so many ways. Teo You Yenn encourages all of us who live in Singapore to ask hard questions about the structural and psychic elements of inequality, and to challenge the comforting and yet ultimately self-defeating stories that many of us who have benefitted from Singapores economic progress tell ourselves. This Is What Inequality Looks Like is also beautifully written. It is an inspirational model of how an academic scholar can address a popular audience through a deep reflection on her position as a Sociologist, inviting readers to embark on parallel learning journeys commencing in the often overlooked experiences of people who inhabit other social worlds.
Philip Holden, Professor of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore

In this accessibly written and closely observed new book, Teo You Yenn takes the reader beyond the statistics and into the everyday lives of the less fortunate in Singapore. A timely and necessary book for a city in a hurry.
Philip Gorski, Professor of Sociology, Yale University

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