Interview with “Best Paper Prize 2024–2025” Winner, Xinyu Guan

City & Society interviews Xinyu Guan, the winner of the C&S “Best Paper Prize 2024–2025″ for his article “Eight Hours Only”: Landlords, Tenants, and the Everyday Politics of Air-Conditioning in Singapore.”

Moriah James: “What was the context surrounding your ethnographic research on air conditioning in Singapore? How did you discover this particular topic?”

Xinyu Guan: “My research looks at how migrant and queer inhabitants appropriate state-constructed housing in Singapore, which is built around the heteronormative, nuclear family. Citizens typically buy apartments from the state, and they are allowed to rent out spare rooms or apartments. Working-class migrants, in particular, often live scattered among non-migrant homeowners, from whom they rent spare rooms, rather than clustering in migrant enclaves. I was interested in the everyday interactions between the citizen-homeowners and the migrant-tenants to whom they rent out spare rooms or apartments. It was fortuitous that I discovered that a lot of the landlord-tenant disputes revolved around air-conditioning. While I did not set out to study air-conditioning per se, I found it fruitful to think with the technical specificities and affordances of the air-conditioning system, to explore what privacy, surveillance and rules mean in the context of rented housing.”

Moriah James: “The field is always full of surprises! Were there any unexpected elements that emerged while you were researching?”

Xinyu Guan: “The one big surprise was definitely the centrality of air-conditioning to the socialities and political economies of the form of housing that I was exploring, which was not something I had given much thought about. However, I quickly realized that it was something that structured the socialities of state-constructed housing. I had previously set out to study the everyday intimacies of non-nuclear-family, queer living situations, but what I instead encountered was a kind of nonsocial sociality, a kind of proximity without intimacy that intrigued me. Air-conditioning allows unrelated people to live together in the same apartment, keeping their doors shut without feeling too hot in a tropical climate. Air-conditioning supports an entire political economy of homeowners renting out spare rooms to migrant-tenants, but it is not something that has been discussed in these terms.

Moreover, I also did not expect air-conditioning to be such a huge bone of contention between landlords and tenants. Landlords would try and regulate the number of hours the tenants can use air-conditioning in a day, which was also something I had personally experienced when I was looking for a place to live while conducting fieldwork. My article grew out of these conversations and observations on air-conditioning and its nonsocial, and sometimes antagonistic, socialities.”

Moriah James: “I was struck by your idea of “opacity” and the ways that individual air-conditioning units allow for more tenant privacy (but also for more landlord surveillance). Were these themes of privacy and surveillance something that you had accounted for before going into the field? Or did it emerge unexpectedly?”

Xinyu Guan: “Before going to the field, I had been more interested in how queer and migrant inhabitants of state-constructed housing formed community, and how they created new socialities in a space that is commonly taken to be heteronormative and socially conservative. Questions of privacy were at the back of my head, rather than something that I centered in my research questions as I was going into the field. The themes of surveillance were something that emerged while I was doing fieldwork, because my queer and migrant interlocutors often complained about intrusive surveillance by their landlords and/or neighbors. Migrant-tenants often express not just a desire for privacy, but also privacy as some kind of rights claim, particularly tenants who live in the same apartment as their landlords.

Previously I had thought of privacy and surveillance as emerging from intentional acts: from intentionally shielding part of your life from scrutiny, or intentionally surveilling somebody. But I was struck by how my interlocutors often based their expectations of privacy on the material properties and affordances of nonhuman household objects and assemblages, which in themselves do not reflect or convey human intentionality in a straightforward way. Rather, these objects and assemblages often generate an element of inscrutability and uncertainty, which then becomes the baseline around which people form their expectations around privacy. For example, air-conditioning compels tenants to close their bedroom doors and windows, making it more difficult for the landlord to monitor what is going on inside, and tenants would expect the landlord not to transgress this boundary. Expectations of privacy and surveillance hence form around the unknowability of material assemblages. I borrowed the term “opacity” from Edouard Glissant’s (1997) Poetics of Relation to characterize this kind of unknowability that tenants use to claim a right to privacy. In speaking of a “right to opacity,” Glissant shows how the opaque and illegible can be a resource for folks who are disempowered. I found it helpful to use opacity as a concept to theorize how the inscrutability of the material assemblages of housing can sometimes empower migrant-tenants (and sometimes not).”

Moriah James: “I’m curious about future trajectories. Do you have a book manuscript that’s in progress?”

Xinyu Guan: “Yes! I am currently working on my first book project, Minor Opacities: Private Spacetimes in Singapore’s Public Housing, which asks how migrant and queer residents conceptualize, experience and contest the private – private ownership, privacy and the private sphere – in state-constructed housing in Singapore. The book is based on my dissertation research, which looked at queer and migrant inhabitations of state-constructed housing, but centers the political and moral economies of privacy and the private sphere, which grew out of my interlocutors’ critiques and reflections on how they inhabit urban space in Singapore.”

Moriah James: “Amazing! Is there a similar issue or topic that you would like to study next?”

Xinyu Guan: “For my next project, I would like to study these questions of retirement migration, property purchases and kinship futurities. Many of my migrant and/or queer interlocutors in Singapore have described to me at length about their plans to retire outside of Singapore, especially in neighboring Asian countries. I am interested in how retirement figures as a form of political critique, and is enmeshed with expectations of transnational care and kinmaking.”

Read Xinyu’s article in City & Society