Graduate Supervision

I am interested in supervising projects engaged with questions of materiality, infrastructure and/or nation-ness. While projects addressing China, transport infrastructure and identity would make for obvious resonances with my previous work, prospective students should aim for deeper theoretical and conceptual similarities.

Current Research

My current research examines state-making and nation-building in Singapore and Southeast Asia through the lens of digital infrastructure of cashless payment systems. This project brings together geopolitics of state territorialization, digital geographies of platformization and the 'stack', and urban geographies of smart citizenship. Singapore has long positioned itself as a major nexus within global circuits of capital and a frontrunner in ICT and finance infrastructure. The Smart Nation Initiative has served as a central mechanism for developing and rolling out novel digital infrastructure ranging from the pandemic-era TraceTogether tracking app to SGQR, a unified portal infrastructure for cashless payment platforms, including Singapore’s homegrown PayNow. These cutting-edge digital and financial infrastructures serve a dual role: while keeping Singapore at the forefront of global technological competition, within the state’s borders they facilitate everyday economic flows. In Singapore’s iconic hawker centres, the use of SGQR for payment symbolizes the harmonious flow from Singapore’s communal past towards its future development. Yet the rapid proliferation of digital finance infrastructure has not always gone according to plan: for some, the ‘frictionless’ flows are unexpectedly turbulent, and ‘transparent’ interfaces are turn out to be strikingly impermeable. What emerges is a new geography—or topology—of enclosure and exclusion.

This project seeks to examine how multiple scales—the global competition for capital and prestige, the nation-state governed for and by the society of a particular place, and also the uneven regional landscape—fit together. How do state-backed platforms bound territories without binding its citizens? How does Singapore delineate its community without limiting its economic reach? However, this project equally attends to scales of everyday life, investigating how state stacks are realized through everyday processes of exchange. The ubiquity and mundanity of cashless payment platforms makes for an intimate and concrete lens through which to examine the vast abstractions of state, nation, economy and territory. Cashless payment infrastructure is particularly apropos site to ask such questions right now, as Singapore payment platforms are developing bilateral linkages with peer platforms in countries like Thailand, India and Malaysia.