Research
In my research, I study how development finance transforms environments and people’s lives in Southeast Asia, and how people in turn contest these processes. Based on ethnographic and qualitative methods, my work sits at the intersection of political ecology, economic geography, development studies, and critical agrarian studies. Empirically, I have studied the social-environmental ramifications of the for-profit microfinance industry in Cambodia as well as large-scale water infrastructure in the Lower Mekong Basin. Through this work, my key intellectual contribution has been developing the concept of agrarian finance, which explains how changes in agrarian political economy, environment, and social life are driven by processes of financialization.
More broadly, I have advanced theoretical debates about agrarian change, debt, dispossession, nature’s commodification, and climate finance within geography and allied fields. I am currently leading a project to critically investigate impact investment for sustainable development in Southeast Asia. Combining insights from political ecology and economic geography, this project will advance theories about the relationship between so-called sustainable finance, uneven development, and social-environmental injustice.
Over the past decade, I have led or co-led research projects funded by multiple research and scientific agencies, including the Fulbright Student Program, Mellon Foundation, and NASA. My latest project is supported by a Tier 1 academic research grant from Singapore’s Ministry of Education. Furthermore, I have an established record of publishing my research findings in leading geography and interdisciplinary journals, such as Progress in Human Geography, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Antipode, Development and Change, and The Journal of Peasant Studies. This work has been recognized for its contributions to geography, having received paper awards from the Cultural & Political Ecology and Development Geographies specialty groups of the American Association of Geographers.
Teaching
In my teaching, I aim for students to connect global environmental and socio-economic challenges to their personal lives, thereby fostering direct engagement with these issues. Through thoughtful design and use of pedagogical approaches, my students interrogate topics ranging from regional resource extractivism to global climate change. They do so through active and participatory learning methods, such as in-class discussion, fieldwork, and peer-reviewing. I also focus on providing students with the research skills required to critically engage with these issues within and beyond the classroom. Students in my courses engage in the full range of research practice: hands-on fieldwork, individual writing exercises, peer-group discussion, and research presentations. By drawing on this teaching philosophy, I have helped students at NUS find sustainable solutions to social and environmental problems and have received two teaching awards: the Faculty Teaching Excellence Award in 2022 and the highly competitive, university-wide Annual Teaching Excellence Award in 2023.
Education
Online Profiles
My undergraduate teaching focuses on political ecology, development studies, Southeast Asian studies, and methods in human geogrpahy. I teach the following modules in the Department of Geography here at National University of Singapore:
GE2101 - Methods and Practices in Geography (co-taught with Dr. Gretchen Coffman)
GE3251 - Southeast Asia
GE4219 - Development and Environment in Southeast Asia
GE4232 - Global Political Ecology
Impact Investment for Sustainable Development in Southeast Asia
I have just launched this new project, which is funded with a Tier 1 academic research grant from Singapore’s Ministry of Education. This three-year project has three interrelated goals: First, to map out the impact investment market in Cambodia in relation to global networks of sustainability finance. Second, to critically deconstruct the discourses of impact investment—both its quantitative metrics and representational narratives—that have rendered investable new environments and livelihoods for finance capital. Third, to analyze the social and environmental outcomes of impact investment into three sectors in Cambodia: microfinance, conservation, and renewable energy. Through this research, I aim to advance theoretical work on sustainability, financialization, and uneven development within political ecology, economic geography, and related fields.
The Financialization of Agrarian Landscapes in Cambodia
I am also currently finishing this project funded by a faculty start-up grant at the National University of Singapore. This research advances geographic and interdisciplinary theory about agrarian financial capitalism. It examines how state and financial institutions at multiple scales have integrated Cambodia’s rural banking system into a financially-based regime of accumulation. This builds on my prior doctoral work, where I analyzed microfinance, precarity, and land dispossession in rural Cambodia to explain the role of debt in agrarian change under conditions of neoliberal financialization.
ARTICLES IN JOURNALS
CHAPTERS IN BOOKS
BOOK REVIEWS