Unease Quotes

“How we organise society is a choice. Public policy, laws, regulations, institutions -- these are all choices, perhaps not in unlimited ways, but they are nonetheless human-made. Inequality is part of that choice.”
― Teo You Yenn, Unease: Life in Singapore Families

“Social conditions ('structure') shape the limits and possibilities of ordinary people's everyday habits and sensibilities ('culture'). What sociologists are talking about when we talk about 'culture' -- meanings, values, practices, in this case about motherhood and fatherhood -- take form around specific social conditions. Picture the metal structures of the 'Supertrees' at Gardens by the Bay and the ferns and vines that grow up around, through, on them -- that's the image of structure and culture I'm trying to evoke here.”
― Teo You Yenn, Unease: Life in Singapore Families

“There is a high degree of formal rationality in Singapore life. The government's bureaucratic capacity is formidable -- efficient as well as inescapable and encompassing. To exist in Singapore is to partake; there is no outside.”
― Teo You Yenn, Unease: Life in Singapore Families

“Ideas and accounts about society exist in context. This script is possible because of a specific political economy of knowledge production. Political and economic elites in Singapore have a multiplicity of overt and subtle instruments through which to represent their worldviews as universal ones... Let me nonetheless thrown down the gauntlet: the inability to take ordinary people's experiences seriously stems from an elitist blindspot.”
― Teo You Yenn, Unease: Life in Singapore Families