Abstract

This seminar explores how park volleyball functions as a form of social infrastructure within multicultural urban contexts, focusing on Sunday games organised by migrant workers at Old Terminal Lane near Kallang MRT station in Singapore. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and informed by theories of social infrastructure, everyday multiculturalism, and public space, the study highlights how these gatherings initiated and sustained by migrant workers transform overlooked urban margins into vibrant, inclusive social arenas. More than casual recreation, these park volleyball games facilitate cross-cultural interaction, urban belonging, and grassroots community formation among diverse groups, including migrants from the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, as well as local Singaporeans. The paper argues that such practices challenge dominant narratives of migrant exclusion and urban segregation, offering alternative models of conviviality, co-presence, and vernacular claim-making. Implications to how public spaces can be utilised to promote migrant worker integration will be discussed.    

Other contributors:

Dr Amanda Wise is Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University where she teaches Urban Sociology, Race, Migration, and ‘Diversity’. She has published widely on everyday multiculturalism and urban diversities among workers. She is currently researching the nexus between global cities and the everyday sociology of urban marginality through research on the leisure practices and working lives of migrant workers and culturally diverse communities in Sydney and Singapore.

Dr Kristine Aquino is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Design and Society at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Her research examines migration and mobilities across Asia and Australia, with a particular focus on Filipino migration, migrant urbanisms in global cities, and ethnographies of race and racism.

About the speakers

Associate Professor Selvaraj Velayutham is a Sociologist at Macquarie University whose research focuses on migration, multiculturalism, race and ethnicity, and the sociology of everyday life.  He has published widely on everyday multiculturalism, race relations, racism and anti-racism in Singapore.

Dr Leong Chan-Hoong is Senior Fellow and Head of Social Cohesion Research Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University.  He sits on the International Advisory Board at the Centre for Applied Cross-cultural Research, in Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.