08/10/2025
At Singapore Management University this week, Professor Amanda Wise and Associate Professor Selvaraj Velayutham (Macquarie University), together with Dr Kristine Aquino (University of Technology Sydney), presented their research on the transformative power of informal sport in the lives of migrant domestic workers in Singapore.
Every Sunday, vacant land around Singapore’s Old Terminal Lane is remade into a community-built arena of leisure and resilience. Women who spend their working week in demanding and often isolating jobs transform this overlooked stretch of the city through volleyball — playing hard, cheering loudly, singing, dancing, and claiming space together in ways that foster both health and belonging. What may appear as ‘just a game’ is in fact a transformative arena:
· Health & Wellbeing: the embodied joy of sport strengthens physical fitness while shared play and camaraderie foster confidence and mental wellbeing.
· Social resilience: solidarity networks provide safety, friendship, and collective care that counter isolation and precarity.
· Public space: an otherwise marginal lane becomes a vital site of community life and visibility.
· Informal sport: self-organised tournaments and rituals become acts of agency and self-making within constrained lives.
As the presenters highlighted, these everyday practices constitute subtle but powerful forms of resistance, resilience, and self-making — destabilising stereotypes of migrant workers as compliant and invisible, and revealing instead their creativity, strength, and collective capacity to build more expansive forms of wellbeing. The presentation derives from a larger comparative research funded by the Australian Research Council looking at social resilience, public space and informal sport in Sydney and Singapore.
