Current Research |
I am currently working on several projects clustered around issues related to energy transition, oceanic-urbanism, state-market responses to decarbonization, and uneven development underpinned by transformations related to international and regional maritime regulations and the global maritime economy more broadly. My regional focus is south and southeast Asia.
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Ongoing Research
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My dissertation, “Market Making: Crises and the Global Production of Shipbreaking in Chittagong, Bangladesh,” theoretically framed in Marxian political-economy and nature-society geography, interrogated the production of the shipbreaking market in Bangladesh. Using a multi-sited ethnographic approach to explore the development of the commercial shipbreaking market in Bangladesh, my findings revealed how shipbreaking is embedded in a multi-scaled arrangement of markets: labor, raw materials, construction, and currency, and its exponential growth is tied to the financialization of the shipping sector and the economy of Bangladesh since the 1980s.
Emerging from my dissertation, ongoing research is nested in a secondary set of findings where I am examining how a recently ratified international regulation, the Hong Kong Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships, aimed at mitigating the hazardous environmental and labor issues, is dynamically producing conditions for uneven development, and exacerbating geographies of exploitation, further embedding a precarious population of ship breakers into global cycles of accumulation. |
Fieldwork 2014-2016 | 2022-2023
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Singapore 2022-2023
Description of field research forthcoming |
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Chattogram, Bangladesh 2016
Exploratory field work in 2014 brought me back to Chattogram where I met with local stakeholders and financiers of multinational banks working out of local offices about the financial, legal, and regulatory mechanisms that make the transfer and movement of ships possible. In 2016 I had the opportunity to tour two ship recycling yards and learn from owners and managers about how recent regulatory pressures were manifesting in the yards. |
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Dubai 2016
There are many important stakeholders in the global ship recycling market that have set up their headquarters or have offices in Dubai due to the strategic timezone it offers. I traveled to Dubai a couple times to meet with some of these stakeholders and to attend Tradewinds annual Ship Recycling Forum. |
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London 2015
An historical-geographic set of questions on the emergence of shipbreaking in Bangladesh and the geography of the global scrap markets more generally in the second half of the 20th century led me to mine the Shipping Register and Casualty Returns at Lloyd's Register Foundation Heritage and Education Center. While in London, I also spoke to key financial, regulatory, and shipping stakeholders, all important actors in the global demolition market. |
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Chattogram, Bangladesh 2014
I worked in the offices of a local NGO during exploratory fieldwork in Chattogram while I also connected with local agents of international stakeholders and studied the way in which this maritime market infiltrates and helps to make the urban landscape. |
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Singapore 2014
Singapore was identified as an important location for the shipbreaking market in Bangladesh, especially since the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. I traveled to Singapore to meet stakeholders who could tell me more about this relationship. |
