Prof. Dr. Joshua Babcock

Joshua Babcock is an assistant professor of anthropology and affiliate faculty in environmental studies, linguistics, public humanities, and the Southeast Asian Studies Initiative at Brown University. He is a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist whose work focuses on colonial images and the desires that both sustain and disrupt them. Josh’s scholarship has examined issues of race, language, and belonging in global Singapore; modalities of listening and local democracy in US school board meetings; sovereign citizen counterpublics; and a ghost town in Western Michigan called Singapore. His work has appeared in American Anthropologist, the Journal of Asian Studies, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Society and Space, Language and Communication, Signs and Society, the Journal of Sociolinguistics, MediaTropes, and others. He is currently completing his first book, “Image and the Total Utopia: Desiring Distinction in Multiracial, Multilingual Singapore.” Josh is a communications director for the General Anthropology Division of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), a contributing editor of Anthropology News, a 2024 AAA Op-Ed project fellow, and a co-founder of the award-winning Talking Politics platform. Learn more at www.joshuababcock.com.

RCC Project: Between Two Singapores: Imagined Geographies and Unsettling Settler Romances

Selected Publications:

• with Thomas Grant. “A Ghost Town Called Singapore: The Politics of Geographic Storytelling, From the ‘Wild Heart of Saugatuck’ to “Singapore Dunes, LLC.’” Society and Space 43. no. 3 (2025): 385–99. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758241301634.
• “The Polyglot: Plurilingual Wonders, ‘Mother Tongue’ Hegemony, and Totalizing Images in and of Singapore.” American Anthropologist 127, no. 3 (2025): 435–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28079.
• with Ilana Gershon. “How Does the State Ignore? Ideologies and Practices of Substantive and Procedural Listening in U.S. School Board Meetings.” Language & Communication 100 (2025): 186-95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2024.12.007.
• “Seeing (or Perceiving) Difference in Multiracial Singapore: Habits of Looking in a Raciolinguistic Image Economy.” American Anthropologist 125, no. 4 (2023): 783–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13901.
• “Southeast Asian Island City-State, Singapore: Multi-scalar Spatial Fictions and the Hinterland Within.” In New Directions in Linguistic Geography: Exploring Articulations of Space, edited by Greg Niedt. Palgrave, 2022. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-19-3663-0_2.
• “Singapore, City of the Future: Promotional Genres and Visual-Aesthetic Registers of Allochronic Futurity.” MediaTropes 8, no. 2 (2022): 1–39. https://doi.org/10.33137/mt.v8i2.37138.