I am a Singaporean scholar, writer, and organizer, and Acting Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where I am also affiliated with the Asian American Research Center.
My work concerns the global dimensions of Marxist political economy, postcolonial development, racial capitalism, and technological change. My research, teaching, and public engagement investigate socio-spatial reconfigurations of global capitalism from the late twentieth century to the present through a focus on global supply chains, the transpacific logistics industry, policing, and of late, housing and energy in the US. At their heart, my interests are driven by a desire to use my responsibility as a scholar to advance our collective capacity to better understand the structural, yet constantly-shifting sources of harm and violence that prevent ordinary working people from flourishing, and to map these harms in service of anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggle.
I am currently working on three major projects. The first two focus on the history and present of the just-in-time logistics industry, on which I am writing two books. My first monograph, The Logistics Counterrevolution: Fast Circulation, Slow Violence, and the Transpacific Empire of Capital, frames the intersecting histories of decolonization and logistics as a story of competing projects of global resource distribution between the US, UK, and Asia. It argues that what scholars have called “the logistics revolution” of the latter half of the twentieth century is better understood as a logistics counterrevolution, a historical and ongoing project of transnational capitalist empire to demobilize labor struggles and grassroots projects of economic self-determination through the imperial and planetary entwining of global sites of extraction, production, and circulation into supply chains.
My second book project, How to Beat Amazon:The Future of America’s New Working Class Struggle, co-authored with Spencer Cox, examines Amazon.com(link is external)’s corporate expansion strategy and its effects on class composition in the US, and builds on collaborative research with Amazon warehouse worker-organizers to map the contours and strategies of working class struggle within and against its distribution networks. A third project is working with the Central Coast Labor Council and the Santa Barbara Tenants Union to map corporate ownership structures in the Central Coast region of California. Funded by the California Endowment, this project maps transformations to the ownership structure of two dominant industries on the central coast - real estate and renewable energy - and hopes to produce a better understanding of how small post-industrial cities and exurban regions can adapt to increasing job scarcity and precarity.
I was honored in 2023 to be named a Freedom Scholar(link is external) in recognition of movement leaders who participate in academia with a demonstrated commitment to supporting social movements. I am also an associate editor for Environment and Planning D: Society and Space(link is external), the Chair of Campus Labor Organizing for the Council of UC Faculty Associations, and one of the founding faculty members for the Marxist Institute of Research(link is external). I have been involved in labor, internationalist and abolitionist organizing for a decade and a half, and currently organize with Workers in Palestine, the Logistics Workers League, and the Berkeley Faculty Association.
You can read more about me at charmainechua.com(link is external), where I regularly post free-to-access versions of my publications.
Education
Ph.D. in Political Science, University of Minnesota
2008, B.A. in English, with a minor in Political Science, Vassar College
Courses
Past Courses at the University of California, Santa Barbara
Graduate: Logics of Inquiry, Theories of Imperialism, Global Technology and Infrastructure
Undergraduate: Global Economy and Development, Global Socioeconomic and Political Processes, Technologies of Globalization, Ethnographies of Globalization
Past Courses at Oberlin College and Macalester College
Undergraduate: Carceral Geographies, Asian Capitalisms, Critical Security Studies, From Black Panthers to Bandung: The Past, Present and Future of the "Third World”
