Understanding Citizenship through the lenses of Emerging Adulthood: The Cases of Homeownership in Singapore

Abstract

Emerging adulthood (Arnett 1998) has been a popular discourse in recent years, as young people were noted to delay or reject the attainment of traditional adulthood markers, namely employment, marriage, homeownership and parenthood. While most adulthood literature explains in-depth the delay in attainment of adulthood markers, these literature do little to elucidate the permanence of these markers in countries such as Singapore. By exploring the crossroads between Sociological studies on citizenship and adulthood in the life course, this thesis seeks to understand how transitions into adulthood have been institutionalised by the Singapore government. Adopting a case study methodology, qualitative interviews were conducted with six young Singaporean couples about their homeownership aspirations. Research found that the provision of affordable public housing by the Singapore government to citizens not only structures the life course, but more importantly, creates individual consciousness over it. By examining homeownership as a social right (Marshall 1950), the monopolisation of affordable public housing has allowed the state to successfully frame the ‘ideal’ life course as a normative script of the Singaporean life. Through modalities of liberal and communal citizenship as presented by Thompson (2014), homeownership becomes both a tangible and imagined property to reinforce this norm, so much so that it discriminates against those who imagine their life course otherwise. Thus, what it means to be an adult and becoming an adult is deeply embedded in the contexts of the nation-state and ingrained in the minds of its citizens.