Remedial Kids: playful academic lectures for the culturally curious

Satay & Statecraft: The Hawker Preservation Paradox

Remedial Kids is a social community for the culturally curious. We host playful academic lectures at cosy bars across Singapore.

Note: Ticket includes 1 welcome sake drink

Session #11

Hawker centres are much more than places to eat. They are essential third spaces within the Singapore sociocultural fabric, and where some of Singapore's most fundamental policy tensions play out in real time.

This lecture examines the tensions underneath the rhetoric of "preserving" hawker culture, drawing on interviews with 22 hawkers across Singapore to surface existing gaps between official policy positions and ground-level realities. Using a form-versus-function framework, we'll trace how well-intentioned preservation efforts can still undermine the very livelihoods and craftsmanship they claim to protect, and imagine what it may take to build a hawker policy environment where practitioners and diners alike can genuinely thrive.

About the speaker: Jenny is a professional chef and food writer, researcher, and educator who studies food as the foundation for human meaning-making and identity formation. She holds a Master of Education from Harvard University and just finished her Fulbright-National Geographic Fellowship in Singapore, researching food policy in the context of hawker centres. Jenny is an IACP-winning photographer, James Beard Awards-nominated writer, and has been named an industry Game Changer by Food & Wine and a Trailblazing Activist by the World’s 50 Best.

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