Degrees prior to starting this degree program:

B.A. (Hons) in Sociology, certificate in Creative Writing, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 2016

M.A. in Anthropology, certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 2019

M.A. in Anthropology, Princeton University, 2022

Areas of Interest:

Medical and urban anthropology; architecture and urbanism; mental health and creative arts therapies; experimental ethnographic writing; postcolonial cities and cities of empire; Asia Pacific region

Field Research Plans/History:

Alexandra Sastrawati is a multimodal essayist, interdisciplinary researcher, and artistic collaborator. She is a Ph.D. candidate in medical and urban anthropology at Princeton University and a Young NUS Fellow at National University of Singapore (NUS)’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Her doctoral research spotlights global mental health, comparative urban marginality and, on a granular level, queer artists’, migrants’, and laypeople’s recognizable and ephemeral forms of artmaking and care. In addition to ethnography and quantitative social science methods, she works with archives and visual materials spanning the Netherlands, Britain, Japan, and Singapore. In 2022, her ethnographic research and photographs were exhibited at CIVA Brussels. As of 2023, she is based in Singapore for fieldwork. She will be presenting her research at Thessaloniki (Aristotle University) and Toronto (AAA/CASCA) and, later, performing a multilingual poetic piece in Tokyo (Japanese UK Poetry Exchange). Sastrawati was born and raised in Singapore, with sojourns in Japan during her formative years. Prior to moving to the United States for her studies in anthropology, she was a research executive at a non-profit organization. She photographs with a Sony Alpha and a Leica.

Publications, Multimedia Projects:

“Depressed Worlds,” e-flux Architecture (2022)

“Dwells and Descends,” Johns Hopkins University, Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine, Tendon Magazine (2023)

Membership/activities in graduate student events or organizations:

Young NUS Fellow, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore (2023-2024)