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My Research

General Research Interests

The focus of my research has been on industrial transformation, transformation of labor, urbanization, and social struggle around these processes, in countries of the Global South, particularly in East and Southeast Asia. I have conducted most of my research in Thailand (especially Northern Thailand), but have also done some work in China (primarily Yunnan province), the Philippines, and more recently in South Korea. Theoretically, I have been concerned to further the development of meso-level concepts in development theory—for example by posing critical challenges to neo-Weberian conceptions of Asian developmental states. Currently, I am especially interested in bringing insights from Bourdieu’s class analyses into the framework of a broadly Gramscian geopolitical economy. Geographically, I am especially interested in the ways economic and political processes cross territorial (and conceptual) borders—e.g., through globalization of production processes and internationalization of states—as well as how social movements and political struggles themselves cross, or don’t cross, such borders. While I count much of what I study as political economy, I believe that state violence and geo-politics form crucial dimensions of any process of development and social struggle, and as such I am committed to pushing methodologically for geopolitical economic approaches.

Current Research

My current research, which extends research I carried out between 2008 and 2015, is being funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada as well as by Social Sciences Korea. It compares and contrasts the urban-industrial development effects of military-industrial complexes in South Korea and the United States during the Cold War period, with case study sites including the Yong Nam region of South Korea and the Seattle region of the United States.

Past Research Projects

My previous research, which was connected to my current research project, was funded from 2008 to 2011 by the Hampton Research Fund at the University of British Columbia and by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada from 2011 to 2015. It examined the development of a regional economy involving firms from South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Singapore in the context of the Cold War, especially the 1960-1980 period. In this research I have focused on phenomena such as the importance to regional development patterns of US military contracts (particularly during the Vietnam War), an issue that has been somewhat underemphasized in the literature on East and Southeast Asian development. The importance of the geo-political dimensions of the regional political economy—or what can be called the regional geo-political economy—suggests the need to re-examine and re-frame some of the major arguments regarding the roles of developmental states and global production networks in the process of regional economic transformation. I have examined these issues both through archival research, primarily in archives in the United States, and through field research in South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Singapore.

My previous research has also included sustained examination of the transformation of the Thai economy and labor process since the end of World War II. This research, carried out especially between 1994 and 2004 and funded by several grants from the University of Minnesota, resulted in a number of articles and a book, Thailand at the Margins: Internationalization of the State and the Transformation of Labour (Oxford University Press, 2004). From 2004 to 2008, I also conducted research in China Thailand, Laos, and Burma, on the development of the Greater Mekong Subregion. This research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, resulted in a book, Bounding the Mekong: the Asian Development Bank, China, and Thailand (University of Hawai’i Press, 2010).

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