I am a Singaporean organizer, writer, and researcher living and working on the traditional lands and waters of the Chumash people, and am currently Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to arriving at UCSB, I taught at Oberlin College, Macalester College, and the National University of Singapore. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota, and my B.A. in English from Vassar College. I am honored to have been named a 2023 Freedom Scholar in recognition of movement leaders who participate in academia with a demonstrated commitment to supporting social movements.
My interdisciplinary research focuses on political economy, postcolonial development, and technological change, with a specific interest in the history and present of maritime and hinterland logistical systems, on which I am writing two books. I also write about and organize around police and prison abolition. My work has been published in The Socialist Register, Review of International Studies, Antipode, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, The Boston Review, The Nation, and other venues. I have been interviewed in news outlets including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, De Correspondent, and Le Monde, and given keynotes and public talks nationally and internationally. I am also an associate editor for Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and one of the founding faculty members for the Marxist Institute of Research.
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. 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’s corporate expansion strategy and its effects on class composition in the US, and builds on collaborative research with the independent union Amazonians United to map the contours and strategies of working class struggle within and against its distribution networks. Both projects are further detailed on my research page.
I have been involved in anti-racist, abolitionist, and labor movements over the last decade in Minneapolis and California. I currently organize with Amazonians United and UC Cops off Campus.
You can reach me at charmainechua at ucsb dot edu and follow me @charmaineschua on Twitter.