Author Session: Teo You Yenn (Unease)

Teo You Yenn is an Associate Professor and Provost’s Chair in Sociology, and Director of the Centre for the Study of Social Inequality, at Nanyang Technological University. Her research focuses on poverty and inequality, care/welfare regimes, gender and class inequalities, and minimum income standards. She is a founding co-editor of AcademiaSG, an initiative to promote Singapore studies and encourage critical debate about the state of intellectual life in Singapore.

Her books include and .

In Singapore, a loudly ‘pro-family’ society, why is work-life balance so elusive? And why are parents so uneasy? What accounts for this gap between the lived reality and ideal narrative of Singapore families?

Sociologist and bestselling author Teo You Yenn turns her eyes to the contours and rhythms of life inside families, exploring how ‘kiasu’ parents are made and investigating the ways in which inequality marks life in contemporary Singapore. Drawing from in-depth interviews with parents from all walks of life, Unease examines how social structures, individual strategies and common practices come to produce Singaporean ‘cultures’ of doing family.

An incisive exposé of how the logics of hierarchy, competition and unequal worth infect ordinary people’s lives, Unease asks what these cost parents, children and the values we hold as a society. And what possibilities are there for living differently?

Date: Thursday, 07 May 2026
Time: 8.00pm
Venue: Wardah Books, 58 Bussorah Street, Level 2 (Stairs only)

Please come early as we have limited seats. Latecomers might have to stand.

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