Singapore's Extreme Neoliberalism and the COVID Outbreak: Culturally Centering Voices of Low-Wage Migrant Workers

I draw on the key tenets of the culture-centered approach to co-construct the everyday negotiations of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) among low-wage male Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore. The culture-centered approach foregrounds voices infrastructures at the margins as the basis for theorizing health. Based on 87 hours of participant observations of digital spaces and 47 in-depth interviews, I attend to the exploitative conditions of migrant work that constitute the COVID-19 outbreak in the dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers. These exploitative conditions are intertwined with authoritarian techniques of repression deployed by the state that criminalize worker collectivization and erase worker voices. The principle of academic-worker-activist solidarity offers a register for alternative imaginaries of health that intervene directly in Singapore's extreme neoliberalism.

Automated summary

This study utilizes the culture-centered approach to examine the everyday negotiations of COVID-19 among low-wage male Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore, focusing on their working conditions and state repression. The principle of academic-worker-activist solidarity is proposed as a way to intervene in Singapore's extreme neoliberalism.