Hoe Su Fern joined the SMU School of Social Sciences as an Assistant Professor of Arts and Culture Management in September 2016. We managed to get a chance to ask Su Fern a few questions about her research background and teaching interests. Read on to learn more about our newest faculty member!
1. Could you tell us more about your academic background? What discipline is your PhD in and which university is it from?
I chose to pursue an arts degree overseas, as I was seeking exposure and immersion in a more liberal and non-examination-centric approach to arts education. I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne, where I obtained double majors in English Literary Studies and Cultural Studies. The experience was immensely energising, particularly the rich diversity and flexibility of the curriculum. I was able to study literary classics such as those from Shakespeare, Blake and Tolstoy, alongside film adaptations of novels, literary periods and art movements, popular culture such as raves and Asian cinema, theatre genres and styles, philosophy and postcolonial theory.
Out of all the different subjects and fields, I was most fascinated with cultural theory and its emphasis on the dynamics of meaning and power in everyday life. This led me to undertake an honours thesis on the influence of globalisation on fashion cultures in Singapore, and eventually a doctoral thesis that traced the impact of the creative industries policy on design cultures in Singapore and Taipei.
On hindsight, I realise that my research interests and methodologies have very much been influenced by my educational background: my Cultural Studies-based training and its methodological eclecticism has been a relentless reminder of the need to make connections across differing domains of knowledge, and to view issues as complex, multi-layered sites of struggles over identity, power and value, instead of being conscripted by narrowly-defined institutions and expectations of knowledge reproduction. While others may critique this as lacking discipline, the conceptual malleability, methodological plurality and indeterminate parameters of the field are precisely what I find vitalising about cultural studies-based research. Furthermore, it situates me in an awkward liminal space that spurs me to keep learning and enquiring.
2. What other professional positions have you held in the past?
Before joining SOSS, I was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS), which is a think-tank of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. Apart from researching the arts in Singapore, my responsibilities included assisting the Director of IPS with his research, publications and speeches, and organising programmes such as the Young Singaporeans Conference. Together with another research fellow, Tan Tarn How, we started the IPS-SAM Spotlight on Cultural Policy Series, which is a platform aimed at gathering key stakeholders to discuss issues and challenges related to arts and cultural policy in Singapore. Since joining SOSS, I have started a similar platform for arts management and cultural policy, which I hope will garner interest and spark off more critical discussion and research on arts-related topics.
Before IPS, I was a civil servant! I spent two years in various divisions, including the Communications Research Unit and Strategic Communications Unit in the then-Ministry of Information, Communication and the Arts, as well as the Supreme Court. That experience was an enlightening one, as it enabled me to better understand the multiple layers and levels involved in policy, especially within the formulation and communication stages. This complexity was particularly evident in the types of projects I was privileged to be a part of, which included Our Singapore Conversation.
Other memorable portfolios include lecturing and teaching Cultural Studies, Asian Media, Media and Communications, and Design Communications, and doing events management for fashion weeks and festivals in Australia.
3. What made you choose to join SOSS as a faculty member?
I was attracted by the opportunity to be a part of the Arts and Culture Management (ACM) Programme, which aspires to develop arts managers who will be skilled in the facilitation and organisation of arts and cultural activity. For me, our arts administrators and managers are the backbone of our arts landscape as they help enable art to happen. They are hence, sorely needed and yet severely under-recognised. Art works do not simply appear out of nowhere – apart from artists, you also need art managers who provide all forms of support from balancing budgets, writing and submitting convincing grant applications and sourcing suitable funding, to producing marketing collaterals, managing production schedules and securing suitable facilities and technical assistance. Plus, every art work is unique and will require a different set of nuts and bolts. Hopefully, the ACM programme will help develop more competent arts managers who will eventually become our future arts leaders.
I was also drawn to the location of SMU itself, which is within the Bras Basah/Bugis precinct, an area identified as Singapore’s arts and heritage district. I appreciate being situated in a location where our arts museums are our next-door neighbours, and places like Waterloo Street Arts Belt and the Substation are within close walking distance. I also welcome the hustle and bustle of city life, and the mixture of heritage buildings and shiny new developments as sources of inspiration.
4. What courses are you planning to teach? What can our students expect in your classes?
I will be mainly offering courses in the Arts and Culture Management (ACM) Programme. My courses for 2017 include “Cultural Policy and Practice”, “Advanced Arts and Culture Management” and “Arts, Culture and the Global City”.
Without over-generalising, there will typically be two types of students who will be attracted to ACM courses. My classes are mostly targeted at the first group, who are those interested in working in the arts and cultural sectors, particularly as arts managers. I hope that my classes will expose this group to the realities of working in the arts, and provide them with a conducive and holistic environment where they will be able to develop the necessary skills, acumen and procedural knowledge relating to the role of arts managers, across a variety of cultural organisations and contexts. As these skills and knowledge cannot be gained solely from reading a textbook, it is critical that my classes extend beyond the classroom, and incorporate experiential and hands-on learning based on real-life scenarios and issues.
For example, for next semester’s Cultural Policy and Practice course, students will work towards producing a public session where they will interview an ex-policymaker, and showcase their analyses of the impact of some of the cultural policies and programmes she has been involved with. The objective of this project is to inspire the students to critically examine how cultural policy relates, translates and impacts arts development and practice, while also enabling them to develop project management competencies. The session will be featured as part of the Living Room Programme at Centre 42, which is an arts centre dedicated to providing a conducive environment for the creation, documentation and promotion of text-based works for the Singapore stage. Centre 42 has been extremely generous in offering a public platform for students to share their analyses and findings, and to obtain feedback from stakeholders whose practices have been impacted by the policies.
The second type of students will be those who are not planning to pursue work in the arts, but are interested in knowing more about arts production and management. For them, I hope that my classes will enhance their understanding of how arts and artists function in society, so that they will be able to better appreciate the arts as an essential platform where one learns about life and humanity. Ultimately, for me, the Arts and Culture Management programme is not about hard facts or cold theory. Rather it is about empathy and insight; the diversity, and also universality, of human expression and connection, and the appreciation of change, circumstance and unanticipated possibilities.
5. What are your current research interests? How did you end up getting interested in them?
Most of my current research projects look at what I call the “life-worlds” of cultural policy. For me, cultural policy is not just about policy development and governance; it also stresses everyday spaces as sites of struggle between value, meaning, identity and power, the situated constructedness of identity and difference, the seemingly banal conditions of existence, and everyday strategies of power and tactics of resistance. I am interested in grounded and engaged research on the interactions between policy and the conditions of arts practices and production in Singapore, particularly points of disjuncture, negotiation and contention. This is guided by cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s call for the need to embrace the dirtiness of cultural studies and “to return the project of cultural studies from the clean air of meaning and textuality and theory to the something nasty down below” (1992: 278).
One key strand of my research focusses on the interactions and interstices between policy, arts and space (literally and metaphorically). I am currently completing a project that critically examines the impact of the Arts Housing policy, which was introduced more than 30 years ago to provide subsidised work spaces for arts practitioners and groups. Interestingly, although this policy has existed even before the formation of the National Arts Council (NAC), no one has ever conducted a comprehensive study on the impact of the policy on our arts and cultural landscape! This study was inspired by the news that Stamford Arts Centre, which was first allocated as an arts housing space in 1987, would be redeveloped into a Traditional Arts Centre. The then-current tenants, which included The Theatre Practice, Bhaskar’s Arts Academy, and Singapore Lyric Opera, were asked to move out, and many of them struggled to find new suitable work spaces. This was not a unique case – a similar situation occurred when the Telok Ayer Performing Arts Centre was closed in 2013. This is also a situation not exclusive to Singapore. Affordable and usable studio and exhibition space has always been a constant struggle for artists all across the globe, especially inner-city ones. Artists are under increasing pressure from rising rents and new (re)developments. Hopefully, this project will provide a fine-grained understanding of the achievements and shortcomings of the Arts Housing Policy, and trigger more conversations (and research) on the challenges facing artists and spaces in Singapore and elsewhere.
Because of the recent shift in the Arts Housing Policy towards creative place-making, and the increasing growth in arts-led spatial interventions like the Night Festival, I have also been researching the role of the arts in urban planning, urban design and urban regeneration strategies, particularly the impact of the recent focus on place management and place-making, and the stakes, outcomes and tensions.
I have recently been approached by The Substation to be the guest researcher for an experiment that explores what a co-operative model of arts programming in an arts centre might look like. The Co-op was recently formed in early October – the group is currently working out their own terms of engagement, and how they might conceptualise and implement a month of programming at The Substation. I was drawn to this experiment because it aims to answer questions like: How do we contextualise plurality and openness within the arts landscape in Singapore? How can a space like The Substation exercise and embrace these values of openness and plurality? How do differing stakeholders come together and co-author their terms of engagement? How might a co-operative model function in a Singaporean context? What are some alternative models of operation for an arts space in Singapore? What will this experiment reveal about the kind of arts space that is desired and needed in Singapore?
This experiment is a timely one, as it is partly a response to the tension and anxiety within the arts community, to the recent state of affairs at The Substation, particularly the 9-month search for a new Artistic Director, and the subsequent lack of transparency behind the appointment of the current Artistic Director and his initial grand plans, which included removing some of the core programmes and easing out the centre’s venue rental function. For me, these responses, and the Co-op experiment, are reflective of some of the challenges facing the arts landscape today, such as the question of history and legacy, and the accessibility and sustainability of independent arts spaces. The Co-op will be in charge of the programming for February 2017, so do drop by to check out some of the outcomes of this experiment!
Another project that I am currently conducting is a cultural mapping of community-based arts in Singapore. Since the release of the Arts and Culture Strategic Review Report in 2012, the term “community arts” has become widely used, with much state funding going to community arts projects. Yet it remains as an ambiguous and highly-charged concept. Hence, one key aim of the project is to unpack this term, and provide an overview of the development of community-based arts in Singapore.
6. Are there any particular research topics/professional projects that you intend to focus on in the next few years?
I foresee myself continuing to pursue engaged and grounded research on the arts and cultural landscape in Singapore, mainly in the areas of urban cultural economies and cultural policy. I am particularly interested in projects that use immersive ethnographic methods as well as practice-oriented research. Likewise, I am also interested to explore how research may play a role in creative processes. In a 2010 review of Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts (Smith & Dean 2009), Dominique Hecq and Robert Banagan noted the existence of a “chasm that regrettably remains between the artist as practitioner and the institution”, despite “alternative modes of production and concomitant potential of methodological, procedural and even political change, the status of knowledge and knowledge production in the creative arts remains a vexed topic”. Sadly, this is very true in Singapore, where arts writing, criticism and research are still under-developed areas. Hopefully, more practice-based and practice-led research will help bridge these gaps.
7. Could you share with us one interesting fact about yourself?
This will be rather self-evident – my wardrobe mostly consists of dark colours, predominantly black. This is an outcome of my fashion events management days, where most shows required those working as back of house to dress in black clothing. Sadly, this is a habit I have never managed to kick, and have grown rather fond of!