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Dive into the research topics where Kelvin E. Y. Low is active.

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Featured researches published by Kelvin E. Y. Low.


Current Sociology | 2005

Ruminations on Smell as a Sociocultural Phenomenon

Kelvin E. Y. Low

This article looks at arguments concerning the supposed low status of smell in relation to the other senses to shed light on how smell has been perceived historically, across time. It also locates olfactory enquiries beyond scientific, biological concerns and argues for smell as a social medium present in our everyday life experiences. The article explores smell in the fields of history, anthropology, religion, gender and sociospatial analysis, enabling us to comprehend and critique theoretical/conceptual trajectories employed in social science research on olfaction. By looking at theoretical and methodological approaches towards an understanding of our olfactory capacities, ideas are developed about how one can ‘do’ a sociology of smell, where smell is perceived as a social intermediary that affects our ways of knowing, understanding and (re)creating social realities, premised upon the use of smell as a moral judgement of others. These ideas are exemplified through preliminary findings from an ongoing research project on the social construction(s) of smell in Singapore.


Sociological Perspectives | 2006

Presenting the Self, the Social Body, and the Olfactory: Managing Smells in Everyday Life Experiences

Kelvin E. Y. Low

This article considers smell as a social intermediary with regard to the body, presentation of self, and social/moral order. Employing the trajectory of a sociology of everyday life, the data presented here are collected from narrative interviews conducted with twelve respondents. The study looks at how respondents react to bodily odors and how they go about maintaining acceptable bodily scents to facilitate social interaction. The discussion is framed within Goffmanian sociology on the interaction order and corporeal scholarship. The findings show that respondents equate foul odors with social and moral defilement, and this affects how they view social others, adopting attitudes and behaviors of social inclusion and exclusion. Managing bodily odors also points to the idea that instead of approaching the body as an object of analysis, the body should also be analyzed as an active and acting subject, located and influenced by sociocul-tural conditions. This article thus contributes to discussions on a sociology of the body by linking them with olfactory analyses and also aims to supplement the dearth of olfactory research in the Southeast Asian region by using Singapore as an empirical case study.


Ethnography | 2015

The sensuous city: Sensory methodologies in urban ethnographic research

Kelvin E. Y. Low

While urban dimensions of landscapes and the physical environment are often regarded as built structures that relate to functionality in modern life, cities are also sites of human experience that comprise social relationships, memories, emotions, and how they are negotiated on an everyday basis. Embedded within these processes of sociality is how the senses mediate ones engagement with urban life, hence rendering insights into the multi-sensory character of urbanity. This article surveys a range of sensory methodologies that may be harnessed towards articulating the social life of the senses in urbanity such as smellscape walkabouts in order to explicate the doing of sensory ethnography in urban contexts. The aim is to elucidate how place, social actors, and sensory experiences come together in the production and analysis of urban ethnographic research, including the embodied constitutions of researchers in the process of data generation.


Social Identities | 2013

Sensing cities: the politics of migrant sensescapes

Kelvin E. Y. Low

This paper explores the sensory misconduct of foreign workers in Singapore as identified by local residents in neighborhoods across the island city. Urban bodies and sensory differentiation form the focal point of discussion, given that complaints about sensory disturbances are sociocultural expressions of rejection which are connected to power relations in the city. I focus on two cases that have been identified from my research on Singapore newspaper archives dating between the 1800s and the present-day context. Employing the notion of transnational urbanism, the paper deliberates upon urban sensory politics in Singapore and shows how urban spaces are sensorially politicized by different groups through content analysis of media reports. By considering both historical and contemporary transnationalism, the paper contributes to further understandings on urbanity, migration, and sensory studies.


The Sociological Review | 2013

Olfactive Frames of Remembering: Theorizing Self, Senses and Society:

Kelvin E. Y. Low

By analysing sensorial aspects of social memory and emotions, this paper theorizes the social significance of olfaction and other senses towards reconfigurations of self and social interactions through embodied identity work. The research question that this paper addresses is: how is the self perceived through memories that are mediated by smells? Olfactive frames of remembering are employed in order to explicate sensory meta-narratives including sensory relations (pertaining to familial and other ties), sensory memory, time and space, and sensoryscapes. This article also elucidates upon the various moral, cultural and aesthetic codes that may be discerned in biographical narrations of social actors drawn from narrative interviews. Furthermore, it highlights a need to consider sensorial-bodily experiences in qualitative inquiry and thereby conceptualize how actors articulate their sense of self, and how they reformulate their experiences and relationships with others vis-à-vis emotional discourses of happiness, sadness and nostalgia in the maintenance and continuity of selfhood. The paper therefore contributes to sensuous scholarship by explicating how smells and memories operate in conjunction toward shaping self-identity and social relations.


Ethnic and Racial Studies | 2016

Migrant warriors and transnational lives: constructing a Gurkha diaspora

Kelvin E. Y. Low

ABSTRACT The Nepalese Gurkhas have often been regarded as brave warriors in the scheme of British military recruitment since the 1800s. Today, their descendants have settled in various parts of South East and South Asia. How can one conceive of a Gurkha diaspora, and what are the Gurkhas and their families’ experiences of belonging in relation to varied migratory routes? This paper locates Gurkhas as migrants by deliberating upon the connection between military service and migration paths. I employ the lens of methodological transnationalism to elucidate how the Gurkha diaspora is both constructed and experienced. Diasporic consciousness and formation undergo modification alongside subsequent cycles of migration for different members of a diaspora. The article thus evaluates the transnational lives of migrants, and how these are connected to re-territorialized dimensions of identity and belonging.


Food, Culture, and Society | 2018

Eating in the city

Kelvin E. Y. Low; Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho

Abstract This special issue introduction examines why and how food matters in Asian cities and foodscapes, thus providing a different lens from Western interpretations of urban space. As cities transform, the ways that people eat and procure food also change, along with the sociocultural meanings of food itself. The special issue brings together seven research papers that together draw attention to the everyday culinary habits, rituals, creativity, and sensory experiences that are collectively used to nurture shared senses of cultural identity and economic livelihoods. In so doing, the papers as a whole consider important issues to do with urban infrastructure, urban governance, diversity, conviviality, and cosmopolitanism.


Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia | 2015

Remembering the Samsui Women: Migration and Social Memory in Singapore and China

Kelvin E. Y. Low

Feener, R. Michael. 2013. Shariʿ a and Social Engineering: The Implementation of Islamic Law in Contemporary Aceh, Indonesia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Feener, R. Michael; Kloos, David; and Samuels, Annemarie. 2015. Islam and the Limits of the State: Reconfigurations of Practice, Community and Authority in Contemporary Aceh. Leiden: Brill. Hooker, M. B. 1983. Muhammadan Law and Islamic Law. In Islam in Southeast Asia, edited by M. B. Hooker, pp. 160–182. Leiden: Brill. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mir-Hosseini, Ziba. 2006. Muslim Women’s Quest for Equality: Between Islamic Law and Feminism. Critical Inquiry 32: 629–645. Srimulyani, Eka. 2010. Islam, Adat and the State: Matrifocality in Aceh Revisited. Al-Jamiʿ ah: Journal of Islamic Studies 48: 321–342.


Pacific Affairs | 2017

Concrete Memories and Sensory Pasts: Everyday Heritage and the Politics of Nationhood

Kelvin E. Y. Low

This paper interrogates how Singapore’s everyday heritage has been framed through embodied and sensory experiences. While buildings and other landmarks have been conserved as heritage icons, this designation also includes particular routes known as heritage trails. Buildings and trails by themselves are not invested with symbolic meaning; it is the processes of heritage packaging that consign particular landmarks and sites with a heritage purpose. By employing the notion of “concrete memories,” I argue that heritage landmarks and trails form a site through which the nation’s history is selectively interpreted, negotiated, and experienced by different actants. Concrete memories comprise three key features: familiarity, sensory remembering, and ownership. The discussion of concrete memories is undergirded by broad methodological principles of actor-network theory. The intention is to call attention to embodied tourism in heritage tourism studies while at the same time addressing the production and consumption of heritage and power relations through heritage networks.


International Sociology | 2009

Reviews: Aspects of Everyday Life: Martina Plümacher and Peter Holz, eds, Speaking of Colours and Odours. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007, 244 pp., ISBN 9789027238955, US

Kelvin E. Y. Low

Featherstone, M., Thrift, N. J. and Urry, J., eds (2005) Automobilities. London: Sage. Noy, C. (2009) On Driving a Car and Being a Family: AReflexive Autoethnography. In P. Vannini (ed.), Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches (pp. 101–113). New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Urry, J. (2000) Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge. Urry, J. (2007) Mobilities. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

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Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho

National University of Singapore

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