Sounds of Precarious Labour: Acoustic Regimes of Transient Workers

This project investigates the sonic staking and regimenting of public, private and liminal spaces claimed by low-wage migrant workers in precarious labour. It focuses on unequal sonic and labour flows around the multicultural city-state of Singapore, where a Chinese-majority population draws heavily upon the resources of a primarily Muslim and lower-income region, particularly in domestic work and construction. This stark inequality has been exposed and exacerbated through the recent COVID pandemic, which has seen 'gold-standard' health-management protocols set up by the government upturned in a sudden and unexpected resurgence of infections among transient worker populations. At the heart COVID's second wave is the invisibilised and overlooked status of transient workers, whose (lack of) welfare - impacting overnight on the lives of all Singaporeans - has become a tipping point in a national-turned-global crisis and issue of public debate. Here, sounded worlds - particularly in electronic and virtual stakings of space, agency and identity amid harsh quarantined environments of packed hostels and employer-shared housing - have become ever more important recourses for migrants in safeguarding their voices, privacy and agency. Researching phenomena from earphone havens to social media singalongs to lockdown concerts and the acoustic disciplining of environments via language exclusion and sonic surveillance (eg maintenance of 'housework sounds' across the home), my project addresses multiple issues in urgent need of scrutiny.

My chief investigatory path targets sonic materialities, with an ocular-strategised approach to multisensorial ethnography that challenges the dominance of visually-determined narratives (Bull & Back 2003). In addition to the obvious (such as songs as therapeutic spaces), I look at the sonic regimenting of migrant communities through language control in homes, workplaces and public spaces, as well as affective soundscapes in places of sanctuary (mosques, churches, NGOs). I also consider musical imaginaries of worker-life on social media. I question debates on migration, cultural cleavage, civil society activism, technology and integration, and take an intersectional approach to analysing competing arcs of race, gender, religion, class, mobility and broader regional politics. Beyond the region, my findings will be relevant to all globally shifting societies where socio-economic inequalities borne of migratory changes and religious tensions loom. These asymmetries have been further intensified by COVID's uneven impact on the socialisation of private spaces and their sounded mappings. This intersectional approach pivots on sound studies (Steingo & Sykes 2019) and decolonised understandings of affective and marginalised labour through interrogating acoustic regimes, sonic havens and all ambivalent spaces in between. It explores interventionist strategies in building new pathways for structured listening and active (re)sounding, and makes transformative contributions towards thinking and policy-making on labour and equality in neglected aural realms whose critical reevaluation should not be overridden by blanket COVID challenges; rather, my research necessarily integrates active responses to the crisis.

Singapore as fieldsite has been chosen for its geopolitics: hailed as the culturo-economic broker for Southeast Asia, this wealthy city of third-and fourth-generation Chinese immigrants operates on asymmetrical exchanges of international resources. Here, notions of 'local' are often conflated with 'national' or 'cosmopolitan'. However, on the flipside of this globalism are ghost populations of low-paid migrant workers. My project gives voice to this invisibilised world and is integral to uncovering sounded counter-narratives of multiculturalism in Asia, where systemic inequalities have escalated the catastrophic impacts of COVID on (un)safe spaces (quarantined; surveiled; excluded; forcefully integrated).