Adelina Ong

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a public consultation in Singapore indicated that most respondents struggled to afford mental health care. AI chatbots are being trialled as an early support option. However, these AI chatbots do not presently deliver culturally nuanced mental health interventions and can exacerbate the deterioration of mental wellbeing through neoliberal resilience rhetoric. The chapter reflects on the performance of mental wellbeing required of young people in a Singaporean education context and argues for the creation of culturally nuanced mental health interventions developed in conversation with people with lived experience of struggling with mental wellbeing. Adopting narrative inquiry as the methodology, this chapter extends Ian Marsh’s analysis of diagnostic assessment tools as performative. These AI chatbots train users to perform mental wellbeing, thus shaping personal narratives of mental wellbeing. This cultivates public performances of mental wellbeing which can, over time, shape social norms.

(2018). Editorial. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance: Vol. 23, On Access in Applied Theatre and Drama Education, pp. 335-339.

One widely accepted narrative in Singapore concerns access and reads thus: education is the main vehicle for upward income mobility. Students are sorted into Normal and Express programmes through the Primary School Leaving Examinations at 12 years of age. Academic overachievement is the socially validated norm. Rising incidents of youth suicide and depression in recent years have been attributed to academic stress. I explore the messy temporalities of hope and propose that hope is created when imaginations of the future are not constrained by the parameters of access.

Falling slowly: stumbling towards an urban art-inspired place practice in LondonSome people put up pictures of friends and loved ones on the walls of a new room as they settle into a place far away...

Thresholds and permeability in performance was an event organised and hosted by PhD students Ben Fletcher-Watson (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) and Adelina Ong (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama), with Cath Badham (University of Sheffield). Funded by the Theatre and Performance Research Association as a Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Symposium, the day was intended to provide a collegiate, supportive atmosphere for postgraduate scholars to share and discuss their research. The event focused on the liminal spaces in between performance, with many areas of study represented, including live art, theatre, musicals, dance, livecasting and multimedia work. While theatre has often been presented in

This article reflects on two performances of place involving graffiti and skateboarding: the first looks at a graffiti intervention by SKL0, an urban artist in Singapore, and the second examines the Long Live Southbank (LLSB) campaign to resist the relocation of Southbank's Undercroft, an appropriated skate space in London. SKL0 and LLSB have galvanised significant public support, suggesting that it is possible to negotiate the aesthetics of a city (in the case of SKL0) and the visibility of (sub)cultures within publicly funded cultural institutions at Southbank Centre. Extending Michel de Certeau's concept of walking as a speech act that articulates possible paths of movement across a landscape, the article suggests that these performances of place demonstrate the possibility of outcomes initially perceived as impossible.

(2015). Creating places of radical openness in Singapore. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance: Vol. 20, 20th Anniversary Issue: Looking Back and Looking Forward, pp. 271-277.