More information about PhD Project on Dredging, Sediments and Land-making Labour in Singapore at KTH and NTU
Below follows more information about the job advert “Doctoral student in Political Ecology (Sustainability Studies)” at KTH in Stockholm that focuses on Dredging, Sediments and Land-making Labour in Singapore. Since the space at KTH website is constrained, we recommend applicants to also read the information on this webpage before they prepare their application.
Disclaimer: The Swedish version of the job advertisement (also translated to English), which is posted on “Vacancies at KTH,” takes precedence in case of discrepancy. This page is merely to provide applicants with some more background to the PhD project.
Singapore beachfront, 2020. Photo by Anastasia Yudin from Pexels.
The original full title of the proposal that funded this PhD position was the following:
Land-making Labour in the Global “Green” City: The Political Ecology of Sediment, Labour, and Dredging in the Making of Sustainable Singapore, 1990-2020
We are looking for an ambitious PhD student to analyze the political ecology of coastal urbanization by developing a qualitative case study on the labour and workers behind dredging and land reclamation in Singapore, an often invisiblized labour that nevertheless laid the foundation for this global city of finance and trade. The focus is on workers’ experiences, histories, migration, organization and everyday places. The project combines urban political ecology (UPE) and labour geography to understand how sediment, machinery and labor combine with industrial and financial capital to shape often unequal urbanization patterns. Employment at KTH’s Environmental Science Department with a 15-24 month stay in Singapore at the School of Social Science at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). You will join a supportive research team that studies the political ecology of dredging and land reclamation. Go here for more information about the PhD project.
Further information about the project:
The making of contemporary Singapore into a global hub for finance and trading rests upon its capacity to make efficient use of small pieces of land and islands. But, also on the ability to literally make land and to keep its ports deep enough for boats to enter and trade to flow. This project will combine the fields of urban political ecology (UPE) and labour geography to better understand the social and environmental geographies of work that are involved in land reclamation and dredging under climate change and within wider capital flows. The project focuses on Singapore and combines expertise of KTH and NTU in developing critical understanding of a globally relevant phenomena.
The history of reclaiming or building new land as ground for industrial activities or housing—and the dredging of shipping channels—is tightly linked to coastal urbanization (Lewis and Ernstson 2019; Connolly and Muzaini 2022) and the expansion of the world economy (Carse and Lewis 2020). With climate change, the capacity to use reclamation work to also protect urban investments and people from sea-level rise and increased storm and hurricanes (Goh 2022), will further increase the importance of this capacity and labour. The under-recognized and largely unseen excavation of large volumes of underwater mud, silt, and sediment to build land is often conducted, either by land-based crews operating machines, or by specialized ships with 24-hour-shift crews that combine well-paid specialists with international ship crew and locally based domestic or international migrant labour. This provides a rich context for exploring how labour geographies intersect with land-making and dredging as an international business, yet clearly intervening in locally situated ecologies and societies. Despite this centrality, dredging and reclamation work remain largely out of view in human geography, urban studies, and regional planning literature. Within this context, Singapore is an important case study in that the city’s growth has literally rested upon the labour of reclamation and dredging and this PhD project will examine the growth of Singapore by centering the viewpoint and experiences of those that has provided the labour necessary for the ground on which the city’s growth rests.
Conceptually, the PhD project will use urban political ecology (UPE) and its metabolic perspective to uncover places and workers foundational to urbanization and capital accumulation (Swyngedouw 1996; Ernstson and Swyngedouw, 2019; Kaika et al., 2022). This is combined with studies of labour geography (e.g., labour regime theory) in focusing on how capital organises the actual work involved in reclamation and dredging, but also how this labour is socially reproduced through everyday spaces on land and at sea (Ye, 2016; Baglioni et al. 2022). While it is up for the PhD student to frame their study, the PhD project is set up to contribute a place-specific study of the role of labour in shaping dredging, sediment-, and sand excavation as an industrial and anthropogenic force that mixes with wind, water currents, and gravity in shaping coastal urban landscapes. This opens for discussions with several emergent debates in related fields, e.g., geosocialities (Palsson and Swanson 2016), political geology (Yusoff 2018), sociogeomorphology (Ashmore 2015), the “social life of sediments” (Parrinello and Kondolf 2021)—and the political ecology of dredging (Carse and Lewis 2017, 2020; Gustafson 2021).
Within the context of climate change and rapid urbanization, the PhD student can gain knowledge and expertise for global policy on reclamation, dredging, and labour in relation to adapting cities to sea-level rise and shaping more sustainable and just coastal urbanization patterns.
Suggested planned mobility for the PhD student
- Year 1—Q1-Q4: PhD student enrolled at KTH. Reading and developing their research proposal and methodology. Shorter trip to Singapore.
- Year 2—Q1-Q2: Finalizing research proposal; (Q3-Q4) Begin 12-18 month stay at NTU with field work, analysis, and writing.
- Year 3—Q1-Q4: Continue with field work, analysis, and writing at NTU.
- Year 4—Q1-Q4: Back at KTH, writing, finalizing and defending the thesis.
Possibility to assist in teaching to gain experience at KTH and NTU could be included.
Partnership competence:
The project is part of a wider project on the political ecology of dredging and coastal urbanization called Terra Potentia: The World-making Force of Dredging led by Professor Henrik Ernstson at KTH with ongoing case studies with experienced scholars in Hamburg (Germany), Savannah (USA), New Orleans/Houston (USA), and Luleå (Sweden). The project extends Associate Professor Junjia Ye’s focus on urbanization and migrant labour in Singapore (Ye 2016).
Henrik Ernstson is Professor in Sustainable Urban Development and Docent in Political Ecology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He is Honorary Senior Research Scholar in Human Geography at The University of Manchester, UK, where he previously worked as Lecturer and was Honorary Associate Professor in Urban Studies at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, where he lived and worked for almost a decade. He is a human geographer and leading urban political ecologist with key contributions to urban political ecology, urban ecology, and infrastructure studies. His book Grounding Urban Natures: Histories and Futures of Urban Ecologies (MIT Press 2019, edited with Sverker Sörlin) won the MIT Press Library Award, followed by Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-Obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities (Routledge 2019, edited with Erik Swyngedouw). He has published in leading journals including Antipode, Urban Geography, Geoforum, and Theory Culture and Society, amongst others, and won the best article awards in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research in 2023 and Urban Studies in 2018.
Junjia Ye is Associate Professor in Geography at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She completed her PhD in Geography at the University of British Columbia. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of migration studies, cultural diversity, and the political-economic development of urban Southeast Asia. Her recent work examines the production of migrant subjectivities through state and community surveillance. Her work has been published in top journals including Progress in Human Geography, Antipode, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Annals of the American Association of Geographers and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Her first monograph, Class Inequality in the Global City: Migrants, Workers and Cosmopolitanism in Singapore (2016, Palgrave Macmillan) won Labour History’s annual book prize.
References
Ashmore, Peter. 2015. ‘Towards a Sociogeomorphology of Rivers’. Geomorphology 251:149–56.
Carse, Ashley, and Joshua A Lewis. 2017. ‘Toward a Political Ecology of Infrastructure Standards: Or, How to Think about Ships, Waterways, Sediment, and Communities Together’. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 49 (1): 9–28.
Carse, Ashley, and Joshua A. Lewis. 2020. ‘New Horizons for Dredging Research: The Ecology and Politics of Harbor Deepening in the Southeastern United States’. WIREs Water 7 (6).
Connolly, Creighton, and Hamzah Muzaini. 2022. ‘Urbanizing Islands: A Critical History of Singapore’s Offshore Islands’. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 5 (4): 2172–92.
Ernstson, Henrik, and Erik Swyngedouw, eds. 2019. Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-Obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities. Abingdon & New York: Routledge.
Goh, Kian. 2023. ‘In Formation: Urban Political Ecology for a World of Flows’. In Turning Up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency, 222–43. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Gustafson, Seth. 2021. ‘“We Dredge Because It Doesn’t Work”: Urban Political Ecology and the Uneven Geographies of Sediment Metabolism’. Urban Geography 42 (8): 1099–1118.
Kaika, Maria, Roger Keil, Tait Mandler, and Yannis Tzaninis, eds. 2023. Turning Up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Lewis, Joshua A, and Henrik Ernstson. 2019. ‘Contesting the Coast: Ecosystems as Infrastructure in the Mississippi River Delta’. Progress in Planning 129:1–30.
Palsson, Gisli, and Heather Anne Swanson. 2016. ‘Down to Earth: Geosocialities and Geopolitics’. Environmental Humanities 8 (2): 149–71.
Parrinello, Giacomo, and G. Mathias Kondolf. 2021. ‘The Social Life of Sediment’. Water History 13 (1): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12685-021-00280-w.
Swyngedouw, Erik. 1996. ‘The City as a Hybrid: On Nature, Society and Cyborg Urbanization’. Capitalism Nature Socialism 7 (2): 37–41.
Ye, Junjia. 2016. Class Inequality in the Global City. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
