|
Chua Beng Huat () is a Singaporean sociologist. He is a Provost Professor and the Head of the Department of Sociology at National University of Singapore (NUS), and concurrently the Cluster Leader of the Cultural Studies in Asia program at the Asia Research Institute (ARI). Chua did not have an early start in social sciences or humanities. Instead, he studied Biology and Chemistry in his undergraduate years. In the 1960s where college campuses in North America were fertile ground for counterculture, his involvement with student political activities made him realize that he didn’t have the right personality for natural science.〔http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/soccbh/index.htm〕 He headed to York University, Toronto, to take up Environmental Studies in 1970. A year later, he switched to Sociology and received a M.A and a PhD.〔‘In Conversation with Prof. Chua Beng-Huat’,'' International Sociological Association E-Bulletin'', No. 7, July 2007, p. 39.〕 On whether his lack of an undergraduate degree in Sociology posed an obstacle in his graduate years, Chua remarked, “Probably it was a blessing in disguise. I think if I had done undergraduate degrees in Sociology, I would have sort of glossed over lots of important theoretical readings, feeling that I already know them. Because I didn’t, I read most of the classic texts during my first year in the M.A program. That probably was foundationally the most important thing that happened. I find that with that kind of grounding substantive fields are fairly easy to take up and put down. After twenty five years, I still think that is true.” 〔‘In Conversation with Prof. Chua Beng-Huat’, p. 40.〕 == Early works == Chua’s emphasis on the theoretical over the substantive is evident in his PhD dissertation. Written at a time when an understanding of how reality is socially constructed was just beginning to emerge, he used the Preliminary Report of the Canadian Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism to analyze how government reports are written such that they are demonstrably democratic. It was a phenomenological, ethnomethodological and interpretive piece that exposed mechanisms by which democracy is made visible in texts. “I could have written on reports on crime or whatever because the substance was not important. The really important issue is the production of democracy textually in government reports because government reports, in whatever field, urban planning or deviance or policing, must not be seen as biased in any particular way. It was the processes, procedures and practices – how to manage information that was coming into the report – that was important to me. Specifically, I was not interested in anything substantive. I was only interested in the practices of how one actually uses the structure of the text so that it would appear to be unquestionably democratic,” Commenting on his dissertation: “One of the interesting things I think most people don’t realize is that those kinds of ethnomethodological work can actually be used for social change. Knowing how reality is put together is to know, at the same time, how it can be deconstructed. If you know how reality is constructed, then you know how it can be changed.” 〔‘In Conversation with Prof. Chua Beng-Huat’, p. 41.〕 Shortly after his graduate studies, Chua taught at Trent University, Ontario for about seven or eight years. In 1984, the Housing and Development Board (HDB) has offered him the Director of Research post. He returned to Singapore and took up the position.〔 He began to stray away from wholly theoretical work and focused on writing critically about Singapore as well, including writing a weekly column in the national newspaper, The Straits Times, for one year. As he explained, “Once I came back to Singapore, to a certain extent, what happens locally politically gets personalized. I feel not just the responsibility but also the right to be critically analytical of a society to which my own life is embedded. In that sense, I kind of changed from being an academic to a more public intellectual; in Canada, I was basically an academic whose concerns are of conceptual and theoretical questions of how to do Sociology.” 〔‘In Conversation with Prof. Chua Beng-Huat’, p. 42.〕 His knack for scrutinizing the workings of the Singapore society and his insistence on doing so publicly did not go unnoticed. Within a year, he was fired from his job at HDB for his critical writings of Singapore politics. He joined NUS afterward, and has been there since 1985.〔 The turn of events did not make Chua ease up on his public assessments of social reality in Singapore and beyond. In fact, it freed him of the constraint of being a civil servant and his research and writings expanded into more areas. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Chua Beng Huat」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|