Academic Research

Research Profile:

I am a critical social policy scholar with an interdisciplinary background, I passed my viva in May 2023, with my thesis: Making “heartware”: Statecraft and hegemony in Singapore’s welfare regime.

In my own research, I consider the intersubjectivity between sense and meaning-making and social relations and practices in the reproduction of accumulation strategies of the state ensemble. My thesis offers a theoretical contribution to broaden culture and its application within Cultural Political Economy analyses, particularly through a semiotic lens to unveil welfare meanings as embedded within politico-economic strategies of the Singaporean state. State power functions as a cultural enterprise in the routinisation of everyday practices and meanings, and my account of the state through welfare policy and discourse grapple with the value of culture and its content in the remaking and reproduction of capitalist relations, specifically, that culture cannot be disembedded from the reproduction of capitalist relations and practices, and that political and economic power must be implicated in the making of culture.

Research interests:

Cultural political economy of welfare, critical social policy, technocracy and post-politics, urban policing

Publications:

Yeo, E. And Greener, J. (2023) ‘A Cultural Political Economy case study of Singapore’s Central Provident Fund: Critiquing welfare policy in the reproduction of subordination and inequality’, Social Policy Review 35

Greener, J. and Yeo, E. (2022) 'Reproduction, discipline, inequality: Critiquing East-Asian developmentalism through a strategic-relational examination of Singapore’s Central Provident Fund', Global Social Policy, 22(3), pp. 483-502.