Vanessa Koh

VANESSA KOH, then a graduate student at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, was awarded funding in October 2019 to aid research on “Making Territory: The Creation of Land in Singapore,” supervised by Dr. Erik Harms. This dissertation is an ethnographic study of land reclamation that probes what it means to make both land and environmental claims in an epoch marked by increasing environmental precarity and anxiety. It explores a central research question: how does terraformation animate anxieties around the political survival of Singapore and reveal the ways in which people understand and live with an environment in flux? Facing scarce land and resources, Singapore has reclaimed land by levelling its hills, dredging its waters, and importing sand from its neighbors. In considering governance in Singapore to be a matter of geophysical and geopolitical entanglement, this project reveals how the (re)making of landscapes moves across porous registers of territory, governance, geoengineering, nature(s), and contested claims.