I am an interdisciplinary scholar who works on the relationships between space and power, particularly through the lenses of modern expertise such as architecture, urban planning, law and public administration. I ask how certain abstract concepts like order, justice and chance have been translated into practical schemes that could be studied and deployed to shape society.  My first project examined the various schemes put in place to simultaneously criminalize and legalize gambling in the context of Singapore and Las Vegas. My current project, “Casino Urbanism”, continues this exploration by following the network of experts, capital and practices across the three major casino cities of Asia – Singapore, Macau and Manila.

Of all modern expertise, urban planning is most central to my research. I worked for several years in the national planning authority of Singapore before moving into academia and remain committed to an anthropological approach to planning analysis. What do planners do? How do they imagine, calculate and make decisions? How do these practices create the fiction of a “state” as a historical agent and unified authority? My work on Marina Bay, Singapore, reflects this ongoing project to reconceptualize the “state” as “peopled bureaucracy”.

My research on gambling and casino development has led me to become interested in the relationship between law and space. Over the next few years, I will begin a new project on how “unfreedoms” are produced through modes of containment, segregation and invisibilization.