• You, Scholar: A choose-your-own-adventure story about some pre-university scholars in Singapore

Singapore’s migration policy heavily favors migrants it deems valuable to developing its competitiveness as a knowledge-based economy. To this end, it offers full scholarships to pre-students from Southeast Asia and China to complete their secondary education in Singapore on the basis of their academic excellence. I argue that what appears like a lucrative reward in fact camouflages a biopolitical project of coercion. Through a choose-your-own-adventure game created from life history interviews that interpellates the reader into the role of a scholar, I show that these scholarships act as a bordering regime that assigns value to migrants’ bodies according to their perceived talent. It deploys practices of fear and precarity to discipline scholars into embodying Singapore’s ideal image of educational migrants as human capital, a form of violence lived as quiet experiences on the register of the everyday. However, scholars gradually discover and exploit incoherences within the assemblage of actors constituting the scholarship regime to accomplish their own goals, in so doing subverting scholarships’ attempts at biopolitical control. I call for attention to unspectacular violence that suffuses migrant life in an understudied country even at a position of ostensible privilege, and highlight the possibilities for freedom enacted by everyday negotiation in addition to spectacular, public resistance.