Postgraduate Opportunities

I am happy to supervise PhD students who are interested in research in the following areas:

• Geographical Political Economy of East Asia
• Urban transformation in developmentalist contexts
• The politics of development expertise
• Labour geographies
• Democratization and the politics of space
• Mutations of territory and sovereignty (e.g. zones, enclaves, borders and other spatial experiments)

Please feel free to contact me if you would like to discuss ideas for research.

University of Manchester, October 2012 - Present.

•   Leverhulme Research Fellowship 2018-2019
•   Korea Foundation Fellowship 2016
•   Member: Center for Asian Urban Societies, Seoul National University 2018-present

In addition to my teaching and research at Manchester, I currently serve as Deputy Chair, University Research Ethics Commitee 3 and Co-Director of the Cities, Politics, Economies Research Group. I recently finished a 3 year term as School AD (Research Ethics)/Co-Chair of the School Ethics Committee.

Visiting Scholar, Seoul National University Asia Center, 2016

University of British Columbia. Researcher/Lecturer Department of Geography 2011-2012

Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo. Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Economics, 2010-2011

University of British Columbia, Human Geography PhD 2010

Sungkonghoe University, Seoul. Visiting Researcher, Democracy and Social Movements Institute, 2006-2007

My work fits broadly within the field of geographical political economy, and is situated at the nexus between political, economic, and urban geography. The topic that has consumed much of my time over the last decade is the restructuring of the East Asian "developmental state" model in the context of neoliberalism and democratization. This work has paid particular attention to new imaginaries of economic reform among progressive intellectuals; the expansion of non-standard work and the role of the labour; the politics of international development cooperation; new urban experiments in industrial policy and geopolitical engagement; processes of post-democratization and their contestation, among other topics. I've looked at these topics primarily in the context of South Korea but my work draws on and includes the wider regional and global scales of political economic transformation.

There are four general themes that my current research falls into:

The Post-developmental state

The longest-standing concern of my research to date been on the political economic transformation of the Korean 'developmental state'. I've examined the effects of processes such as financialization, labour market reform, and expansion of official development assistance. This work has been particularly sensitive to the role of liberal and progressive actors in shaping and contesting economic policy, and outlining some of the normative and political dilemmas they have encountered. More recently, I've been interrogating the politics of expertise, by questioning representations of developmental planning and claims about the rationality of elite bureaucracies.

Geographies of labour control and labour activism

This work has examined changing patterns of labour control in South Korea that have been central to the institutionalization of precarious work, as well as responses from social movements, reformers, and trade unions. My past work has looked at issues of punitive control strategies and traumatic tactics in dialogue with other scholars examining global production and neoliberal restructuring. More recently this work has examined labour reforms in the wake of Korea's Candlelight Revolution of 2017, including efforts to create insitutions of social dialogue at both urban and national level such as local level job creation agreements.

Urban developmentalism in East Asia

Much of the literature on developmental states ignores the urban scale, while much literature on urbanization in East Asia ignores the influence of developmentalism. This project examines the ways in which urban space has been targeted for developmental intervention in both Cold War and Post-Cold War contexts in East Asia. I've been working on this project as part of the Center for Asian Urban Societies based at Seoul National University. My contribution to this area has been to look at territorial experiments such as special economic zones as well as the circulation of narratives about solutions to urban-rural inequality through Korea's ODA policy. With Bae-gyoon Park, I've edited a special issue of Critical Sociology on the topic and a recent book on Brill/Haymarket entitled Developmentalist Cities? Interrogating urban developmentalism in East Asia. My latest project looks at the politics of localizing blockchain technologies through special economic zones in East and Southeast Asia.

Shaping political space

Much of my research is concerned with understanding the political in relation to economic change. Some of my past and recent work deals with this issue at a more conceptual level and has contributed to discussions of how we understand political space and processes of post-democratization in various contexts. More recently I've been writing in a more Gramscian lens about how we might understand questions of political will, the role of personality in politics and advance a standpoint critique of developmental state theorizing. My recent open access monograph (University of Michigan Press, 2024) applies a Gramscian understanding of the integral state and 'politics of knowledge' to critique and revise the study of Korean political economy.

Recent funded projects

My research has an interdisciplinary profile, and I frequently peer review articles for journals inside and outside of the discipline such as:

Annals of the American Association of Geographers; Antipode; Asian Studies Review; Area; British Journal of Industrial Relations; Capital and Class; Canadian Journal of Development Studies; City; Critical Asian Studies; Critical Sociology; Democratization; European Journal of Korean Studies: Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space ; Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space; Erkunde: Archive of Scientific Geography; Forum For Development Studies; Geoforum; Geopolitics; Global Labour Journal; Globalizations; Historical Materialism; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research; Journal of Civil Society; Journal of Asian Studies; Journal of Contemporary Asia; Marxism 21; North Korean Review; Political Geography; Political Power and Social Theory; Regional Studies; Religions; Urban Geography; Urban Planning; Third World Quarterly; Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers; Women’s Studies International Forum, among others

Recent Talks (selected):

The Postdevelopmental State: Dilemmas of Economic Democratization in Contemporary South Korea *** Invited Book Talks 2024

Oct 1^st Nam Center for Korean Studies, University of Michigan

Oct 3^rd Center for Korean Studies, UCLA

Oct 4^th Center for Critical Korean Studies/Geographers at Irvine, UC Irvine

Oct 8^th Center for Korean Studies, UC Berkeley

Oct 9^th Department of Geography, UC Berkeley

Oct 15^th Dept of Geography/Center for Korean Research, UBC

Oct 22^nd Asian Institute, University of Toronto

Oct 23^rd Dept of Political Science, McMaster University

Pursuing Decent Work Through the City: Urban Level Experiments in Social Dialogue in Seoul and Beyond. Leiden University, April 2024

The Postdevelopmental State: The Dilemmas of Economic Democratization in Contemporary South Korea. Lund University, Sweden Oct 2023

The political economy of (in)coherence: Development narratives, anxious practitioners and Asian emerging donors. Globalization, Transnational, and Development Colloquium. Maastricht University Mar. 2021

Social Justice in the Developmentalist City? Contesting the nexus between urbanism and developmentalism in East Asia. Department of Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh Jan 2020

The Postdevelopmental State: A Gramscian Interpretation. Department of Geography, LSE/York University; Jan/Nov. 2019

Other Selected Presentations

Geopolitical rivalry, Cold War legacies, and the ‘division system.’ Rethinking d/Development through Cold War histories and present Workshop. Cambridge University, Dec 2024.

Situating the rise of urban-level social dialogue and employment policy in South Korea. SASE 2024, U Limerick, Ireland, June 2024

Yearning for Singapore? Blockchain imaginaries, regional development, and Korea’s special economic zones. EARCAG-GPE Hong Kong, Dec 2023

Blockchain Dreams, Youth Workers, and Regional Development in Busan. 'Korean Youth: Spaces, Ecologies, Technologies Workshop' University of Edinburgh, June 2023,

Yearning for Singapore? Blockchain imaginaries, regional development, and Korea’s special economic zones. RGS-PGSG Conference, University of Sheffield. June 15-16 2023

Failure to leverage: Urban-level social dialogue around precarious work and the challenges of scale. RGS-IBG August 2021

Recent and current PhD students:

(with Erik Swyngedouw and Bridget Martin) Jinsoo Lee. Environmental injustice and the US military in South Korea: geopolitics, post-politics, and the new geography of peace.

(with Kevin Ward) Carwyn Greaves. Geographies of Discontent: Changing Labour Practices in the South Wales Valleys 

(with Chris Perkins and Laura Fenton) Heather Miles. Human Geography, community and participatory mapping practice

(with Mark Usher and Ed Pulford) Tianshu Liu. There is a border in the North: The Sino-Russian border and the making of modern China. Defended Nov. 2024

(with Admos Chimhowu) Jeongseong Lee. Hybrid donorship: Korean aid and the political economy of international development cooperation. Defended May 2022

(with Jonathan Darling and Helen Wilson) Ben Knight. Audible citizenship and the politics of listening within two refugee and asylum-seeking services in Greater Manchester. Defended June 2020

(with Martin Hess) Felipe Irarrazával. Global Production Networks and the Extractive Sector: Natural Gas Rents and Regional Economic Change in Bolivia and Peru. Defended Dec 2019

Journal of Contemporary Asia Prize 2017

My regular teaching includes offerings in political, economic, urban, and labour geography such as the following, among others...

GEOG 10101 Geographies of Globalization

GEOG 20072 Barcelona Fieldcourse

GEOG 31071 Asian Workers and the Labour of Globalization