I am a professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. As a human geographer, my research examines development, tourism, labor, and socio-environmental change in Southeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific through the lenses of political economy, political ecology, and cultural politics. Across my work, I ask how everyday lives and landscapes are shaped by uneven and often transnational processes, including tourism, agrarian change, environmental crisis, labor mobilities, and geopolitical transformation. I am especially interested in how people and places navigate these processes as they materialize through livelihoods, land use, atmospheric pollution, mobility, and the contested meanings of development itself.

​

My current scholarship focuses on the political ecology of air pollution, fire, and environmental-health knowledge in northern Thailand, alongside a project on remote work and the territorial restructuring of labor in Hawai'i and the Pacific. Through ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, textual analysis, and collaborative geospatial methods, I examine how environmental and economic transformations become legible, contested, and lived across uneven social and ecological terrain. Collectively, these projects ask how mobile forms of capital, labor, and environmental harm become embedded in particular places, reshaping livelihoods, land relations, labor markets, infrastructures, and struggles over power and resources.

​

I am Co-Editor-in-Chief of Tourism Geographies and series editor for the University of Arizona Press series Critical Green Engagements: Investigating the Green Economy and Its Alternatives. My publications include two authored books, one published in 2014 and one forthcoming, numerous co-edited volumes, and more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, with recent work in Political Geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Geoforum, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, and Tourism Geographies.

​

When I am not writing about development, tourism, labor, and socio-environmental change, you can find me surfing Diamond Head, hiking the Kalalau Trail, or eating spicy poke bowls on Kaimana Beach.