cultural geographer
of
affect, mobilities, work
negativity
affective transitions
IAG Film Shorts
KSCA
SCGRG
NUS
Scholar
ABOUT
I am a cultural geographer interested in the intensities and energetics of ordinary life in times of economic change. In the broadest sense, my research explores how economic transitions are lived as embodied transitions, focussing on the lifeworlds of industrial and migrant workers in Australia and China.
I combine theories of affect and mobility with qualitative fieldwork and diverse forms of storytelling, including documentary film. I am particularly interested in the politics of dislocation and memory in the present, grounded in non-representational theories of subjectivity and embodiment. Rather than seeing memory as regressive or stuck in the past, I explore the turbulent impasse of what might be called ‘negative’ geographies of the subject — of melancholy, loss and alterity — alongside a more ‘affirmative’ belief (or hope) in the possibilities of the future — of adjustment, transformation and desire.
My recent research explores these durations of affective transition through the micropolitics of coal mine closures, tracking how workers and communities affected by two closures navigated the subsequent durations of loss and adjustment. A prior project followed decisions to return home amongst rural migrant workers in a village in northern China, situating these floating transitions at the intersection of mobilities and social reproduction.
I was born and raised in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia — on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation — by migrant parents from Guangzhou, China. Geography has been my way of making sense of this inherited dislocation — of the cascading and contradictory effects of desires once had, and decisions made long ago, to depart one’s homelands in search of other worlds. In my teaching, I hope to inspire students to see the value of geographical knowledges within their own pursuits of sense-making and world-building — through thought, but also in different forms of everyday praxis.
Alongside teaching and research, I work at the intersection of geography and creative practice. I am a member of the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation, a collective of artists and writers experimenting with adaptive cultural change, and I co-organise IAG Film Shorts with Lisa Palmer and Jane Dyson. I am currently also Treasurer of the RGS-IBG Social and Cultural Geography Research Group.
Since 2022, I am employed as Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. I completed my PhD in the School of Geography, the University of Melbourne in 2021, after a first year spent in the School of Sociology, Australian National University. My undergraduate studies, also at the University of Melbourne, were in Geography and German.
I am a cultural geographer interested in the intensities and energetics of ordinary life in times of economic change. In the broadest sense, my research explores how economic transitions are lived as embodied transitions, focussing on the lifeworlds of industrial and migrant workers in Australia and China.
I combine theories of affect and mobility with qualitative fieldwork and diverse forms of storytelling, including documentary film. I am particularly interested in the politics of dislocation and memory in the present, grounded in non-representational theories of subjectivity and embodiment. Rather than seeing memory as regressive or stuck in the past, I explore the turbulent impasse of what might be called ‘negative’ geographies of the subject — of melancholy, loss and alterity — alongside a more ‘affirmative’ belief (or hope) in the possibilities of the future — of adjustment, transformation and desire.
My recent research explores these durations of affective transition through the micropolitics of coal mine closures, tracking how workers and communities affected by two closures navigated the subsequent durations of loss and adjustment. A prior project followed decisions to return home amongst rural migrant workers in a village in northern China, situating these floating transitions at the intersection of mobilities and social reproduction.
I was born and raised in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia — on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation — by migrant parents from Guangzhou, China. Geography has been my way of making sense of this inherited dislocation — of the cascading and contradictory effects of desires once had, and decisions made long ago, to depart one’s homelands in search of other worlds. In my teaching, I hope to inspire students to see the value of geographical knowledges within their own pursuits of sense-making and world-building — through thought, but also in different forms of everyday praxis.
Alongside teaching and research, I work at the intersection of geography and creative practice. I am a member of the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation, a collective of artists and writers experimenting with adaptive cultural change, and I co-organise IAG Film Shorts with Lisa Palmer and Jane Dyson. I am currently also Treasurer of the RGS-IBG Social and Cultural Geography Research Group.
Since 2022, I am employed as Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. I completed my PhD in the School of Geography, the University of Melbourne in 2021, after a first year spent in the School of Sociology, Australian National University. My undergraduate studies, also at the University of Melbourne, were in Geography and German.
01/2023
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