Min Tan

I am a PhD researcher based in the Geography Department of Royal Holloway, University of London. My PhD research is on intimate and everyday geopolitical conceptualisation of the (post) Covid-19 pandemic – a study of ethnic Chinese communities in London.

My two main research interests are Hannah Arendt’s banality of the evil and how people living in two worlds (ethnic Chinese transmigrants) understand and conceptualise geopolitics. Using Covid-19 as a case study, I seek to investigate ideas of new normal/normality, and understand how citizens going about their everyday lives within the premise of governmentality and state pandemic measures, may exhibit thoughtlessness in their everyday practices that might yield forms of unintended ‘evil’. From a theoretical contribution standpoint, I aim to bring the works of Hannah Arendt into dialogue with critical geopolitics.

My other research interest is in how people living between two worlds (inbetweeness) navigate the world during a new normal born out of crisis/event. The group that I am studying are ethnic Chinese communities in the UK. Given that ethnic Chinese cultural values focus a lot on community, family and kinship, intimate relations and being in two worlds are likely to heavily shape their experience of Covid-19 measures. I am exploring this in the hope that in an increasingly polarising east-west world, the position of inbetweeness can help all to safeguard a political future that holds space for what Arendt calls a common world.

My previous research works were on security and counter terrorism governmentality practices in Singapore, as well as investigating everyday citizens’ reception of state and media security framings.