Douse the Heat

After 2 straight weeks of non-stop work, it all came crashing down to an unglamourous pause with my throat infection today.

As I always like to whine, work at school somehow piles up and buries you before you could say “Nanta”. I was busy with two projects in the last few days:

One was an experiment for a quantitative methods class. We explored the impact of the use of Singlish on listeners’ perceptions of a speaker’s credibility and like-ability in a political speech.

“Whoa wait up, I didn’t get that,” you say. Righty, here’s a watered-down version of what my team mates and I did:

Get a local political speech (freely available) made by one of the MPs or grassroots dudes. Alter it to make a Singlish version (it was tough, but we did it). So instead of “The policies need changing” you’d have something like “The policy ah, must change lah”. Then, get a drama-trained dude to speak these two speeches and record it as MP3s. Then, get 42 students and make them listen to either of these clips and made them fill out forms that ask them how they found the speaker they had just listened to, in terms of credibility (“The speaker is an expert at what he does. Agree, neutral, disagree.”) and like-ability (“I like the speaker. Agree, neutral, disagree.”).

Results showed that yes! – The students who listened to the Singlish speaker found the speaker to be less credible than folks who listened to the English version, but No! There were no differences in how much they liked the Singlish or English speaker. So essentially: don’t use Singlish if you’re a politician, thinking it’s a social glue and stuff like that. Undergrad folks rather believe someone who speaks proper, good, nice, correct, nice, English. We presented the findings today in class and got a comment for using too small a font size in the Powerpoint slides (slaps forehead). Moving on.

The other study, as I had written about earlier, was a qualitative study that explored the identity dynamics a North Indian stall owner faced in a multicultural food court in Singapore. So we did interviews with customers and the vendors at China Square food court, and got a chance to see the world of food, exoticism, and The Other through their eyes. To summarize, there were several tensions, or contradictions, that the food vendor faced, being a vendor: he celebrated his North Indian culture through his food but had to resort to heating up frozen naan (for instance) to get the profit margin up, thus compromising the “authenticity” his culture; then, he felt at one with the general multiracial community most of the time, but felt like an outsider whenever he was rejected or singled out by his non-Indian peers, and he attributed to being Indian. Also, very telling was customers’ stereotypes of Indian food: they predominantly link Indian food with roti prata and rojak, so North Indian food, with its naans and tikkas, is really quite exotic for some folks. We presented this paper last week to good reviews. Probably sending it off for some conference later this year.

Well, that’s about it for what’s been happening. This week’s the week of “Last lectures” as the exams are in 2 weeks’ time, and I felt quite sad about the end of the media law and ethics class. I think anyone in the media line has to go through that course to see how to avoid potential pitfalls, and not to rub the authorities the wrong way. There’s always a way around things, dudes.

OK, back to me nursing my throat infection (scene of me nursing throat infection). By the way, I took the picture above near a tap in school, at high noon. It's "dousing the heat".