Co-Investigators & Collaborators
Shivani Gupta
Dr. Shivani Gupta is a Lecturer at NUS College. She is a feminist anthropologist researching women’s everyday lives in non-metropolitan urban settings. She received her PhD in South Asian Studies from National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2019. Her PhD thesis examined and mapped women’s worlds in the religious, sacred and historical city of Banaras, India. The thesis brought about the oppression and subversion that is practised by women to render their everyday worlds possible. Her specialisation has been in the fields of gender and feminist studies, sexuality studies and urban studies. In the past, she has worked with women and feminist non-profit organisations, in India, where she advocated for gender rights and violence against women.
Research Assistants
in alphabetical order of first names
Andrea Koh
Andrea Koh is a fresh graduate from the National University of Singapore, having majored in English Language and Linguistics. Her research interests lie in media discourse, the relationship between language, gender, and sexuality, and linguistic anthropology. Applying her interest in language and media, she will be assisting in qualitative data analysis, transcription, and maintaining CASMIDA’s social media publicity efforts. She actively participates in the spaces of advocacy and activism as a member of both student-led and external organisations championing against gender discrimination and sexual violence, where she specialises in research and literacy. She aims to imbue her work with core values of empathy and care, with the goal of creating and upholding empowering spaces.
Anetta Fong
Anetta Fong is an undergraduate majoring in Anthropology with a minor in Environmental Studies at Yale-NUS College. Her interests lie in issues related to student advocacy, political education, gender and sexuality. Utilizing her experience with social media and publicity, she will be conducting online participant observation of social media platforms and transcribing interviews. While being a strong believer in the power of social media to enact positive change, she acknowledges its potential to harm and wishes to ensure that digital platforms are a safe space for all. She has been volunteering at feminist non-profit organisations and hopes to empower survivors of sexual misconduct through this project.
Cherie Tay
Cherie Tay is a Sociology graduate from the University of British Columbia who has spent the last year working in finance (strangely enough). She is passionate about advocacy against sexual assault and human rights activism. As part of the CASMIDA team, she will gather qualitative interview data and engage in transcription for analysis to implement policies/initiatives against sexual assault. She is greatly invested in fieldwork and community-based research due to past experiences volunteering at a sexual assault prevention centre and as a crisis line caller for women facing domestic violence. These experiences will influence her role with CASMIDA as she treats the work as well as others with empathy and emotional honesty.
Francis Luis M. Torres
Francis Luis M. Torres is currently pursuing his PhD in Cultural Studies in Asia at the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. He received his MA in Comparative Literature from the University of the Philippines-Diliman. His MA study focused on examining the genealogy of the Philippine gay culture in the country’s first 350 years. Currently, his research interests revolve around the history of Asian gay/queer criticism, gender studies, modernity, digital technology, new media studies, and Philippine culture and history.
Gunit Mittal
Gunit Mittal is an undergraduate student majoring in Computer Engineering with a minor in Financial Mathematics at the National University of Singapore. He is deeply interested in the field of artificial intelligence, its use to gather information and build models for the research study. He will majorly be working on building a platform to gather information from surveyors and using models to make sense of the information. He is honored to be given this opportunity to use his skills and assist in taking a stance against sexual harassment through the course of this study.
Jiatong Han
Jiatong Han is an undergraduate studying computer science and mathematics. He specializes in natural language processing and information retrieval. Regarding research, he takes great interest in machine learning, graph representation learning, and social network analysis. In this pilot study, he will be assisting in scraping data from social media, making social network analyses, and writing the summarization report for all the findings that have been made. Sample research questions include: How did the news spread? How were people’s general sentiments changing over time? He will strive to give an answer. Ultimately, he aims to make some difference in the rising cases of sexual harassment, via technologies and to technologies.
Joseph Kwee
Joseph Kwee is an undergraduate majoring in Mechanical Engineering (Specialising in Robotics) at the National University of Singapore. His research interest lies in social inequality, digital technology and neural networks. His skillsets for the project are app development, web extraction and data visualisation using Machine Learning statistical tools which could attract diverse audiences and supercharge one’s ability to identify patterns and draw connections with it. He aspires to be part of the initiative in enacting change in campuses where undergraduates would be empowered to take a collective stand against sexual harassment using the resources and applications that the research team has developed.
Jovi
Jovi is an undergraduate majoring in Communications and New Media with a minor in Interactive Media Development. His interests lie in issues surrounding student advocacy, gender studies, as well as how digital experiences can be designed to promote safety and inclusivity. With experience in publicity and marketing, he will be assisting in building advocacy resources as well as reviewing scholarly literature on relevant issues.
Nisha Rai
Nisha Rai is an undergraduate majoring in Political Science and South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. Her interests lie in issues surrounding sexual violence, gender equality, socio-politics and governance and public policy within Singapore and India. Through her experience in being directly involved in existing initiatives and efforts surrounding TFSV, she will be assisting in the analysis and organisation of qualitative research data that has been collected, reviewing scholarly literature and conducting online participant observation of forums and social media platforms. She is actively part of various student-led and external organisations to increase awareness of existing societal issues, advocate against sexual violence and create a safe space for victim-survivors.
Sharon Y.X.R. Ndoen
Sharon Ndoen is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Studies in Asia at the National University of Singapore. She obtained her BA in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology and MA in Indonesian Studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her interests lie in a broad range of issues related to gender, subcultures, migration, race and identity, popular culture, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia. Past projects focused on female genital mutilation (FGM) amongst Somali refugees in Western Europe, acceptance of interracial marriages amongst (second generation) Moluccans in the Netherlands, and identity development and origin determination of Javanese in Suriname (South America) and Javanese Surinamese in the Netherlands spanning from 1890 to the 2000s. Her current project focuses on gender propaganda in Indonesian horror films produced during the Soeharto era (1966-1998).
Wrik Karmakar
Wrik Karmakar is an undergraduate majoring in Computer Science with a double specialisation in Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence. His research interest lies in theoretical algorithms, neural network advancements, and applications of natural language processing. He has acquired his skillset from experiences in application development, speech recognition software designs, and machine learning applications in finance, and is eager to apply himself towards positive social outcomes, especially in the space of promotion of gender equality. He is a strong believer in the intitiative of utilising technological advancements ethically and appropriately to move towards a broader and more equitable societal state – and feels that this is, therefore, a unique opportunity to understand, analyse, and accordingly motivate discourse on sexual harassment towards an ideal locus, by furthering the research conducted by this team.
Xinhong FU
Xinhong FU is a master’s student of Public Policy (MPP) at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. Her primary research interest lies in gender policy, social security, and poverty alleviation, and social inequality. Her endeavors in this stream of research reflect her deep curiosity and concerns regarding gender discrimination and stereotypes in society. Currently, she is working on two projects that (i) examine the impact of fertility policy and social welfare on women’s career development and (ii) explore the relationship between the poverty alleviation movement and rural women’s empowerment within China’s context. Related to this project, her work is to conduct data analysis generated from the online survey.
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