Current Research |
I am currently working on several projects clustered around issues of development, oceanic infrastructure, social reproduction, and global political economy in South and Southeast Asia.
My first project builds on my doctoral research to examine the Bangladesh Insurance Sector Development Project, a World Bank Program aimed at expanding the domestic economy through the expansion of insurance markets, and the 'Bangladesh Ship Recycling Bill, 2018,' a bill mandating shipbreaking yards to issue life insurance for their workers. This research interrogates a new form of bio-financialization as fatalities of laborers are being positioned as a novel way for finance capital to capture value from this industry. A second project is grounded in oceanic governance. Off the coasts of Indonesia and Malaysia there are a growing number of ocean-spaces to park idle ships. I refer to these areas as ‘oceanic warehouses’ where shipowners ‘lay-up’ (take offline) their ships for extended periods of time while waiting out the depressed conditions of the shipping markets. A majority of ships sold to Bangladeshi shipbreakers come from oceanic warehouses similar to these. The longer the ships remain idle, the more substandard they become. These new ocean-spaces raise an important set of questions related to pollution, oceanic governance, state interventions and waste trade, not to mention directs attention to the limits of capital. |
Dissertation
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“Market Making: Crises and the Global Production of Shipbreaking in Chittagong, Bangladesh” pivoted from crises—political, economic, and social—to interrogate the historical-geographic development of this particular market. Using a multi-sited ethnographic approach in six global regulatory as well as financial centers of the maritime world, the research found that shipbreaking is embedded in a global network of markets—labor, raw materials, and financial that is underpinned by the dynamic relationship between global economic restructuring and the political-economy of a ‘developing’ Bangladesh. The project examined a nested set of secondary findings that included empirical analyses of: ship finance and devaluation since the 1970s; the actors, spaces, and financial and legal mechanisms used to make the global market work; as well as how the environmental and labor conditions characteristic of shipbreaking pushed activists and global agents towards decades of actions that culminated in the first international “ship recycling” convention. Ultimately, my research shows how this market is constituted with the global ship demolition market. This is a dynamic relationship that integrates shipbreakers and their daily lives into global cycles of accumulation and overaccumulation.
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Fieldwork
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Chittagong, Bangladesh 2016
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Dubai 2016
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London 2015
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Chittagong, Bangladesh 2014
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Singapore 2014
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