The integrative potential of religion in Singapore
The integrative potential of religion in Singapore
Published 1 October, 2019
With this growing influx of migrants, we're seeing much greater complexity within the resident population here. While there's a strong degree of alignment between the pre-existing racial and religious groups here in Singapore, the new migrants are creating more diversity within these categories.
Orlando Woods
Professor of Geography; Associate Dean (Research and Postgraduate Programmes); Director, SMU Urban Institute; Pillar Lead (Urban Life), SMU Urban Institute
In brief
- By bringing diverse groups of people together, religious organisations can play an important role in managing the complexity of diversity.
- Integration is not something that churches work towards or develop themselves. However, this may be a missed opportunity since they already have ready multi-ethnic and multi-cultural communities to engage.
- Churches reproduce spacial divisions within congregations as they segregate the people who attend these services into different rooms and community-based factors like language.
The integrative potential of religion in Singapore
Assistant Professor of Humanities Orlando Woods from SMU’s School of Social Sciences has a keen research interest in areas including religion, cities and urban landscapes, digital technologies, space, and social and cultural geography.
He has published a research paper on the role of Christianity in migrant integration in Singapore, and has received a grant from the Singapore Ministry of Education to conduct further research on this subject. Titled ‘New Religious Pluralism in Singapore: Migration, Integration and Difference”, the study seeks to better understand new types of socio-cultural diversity in Singapore.
In this podcast, Assistant Professor Woods discusses the role of whether religion enables or dis-enables migrant integration into Singapore.