Research

I am a social scientist specializing in the political networks, organization and discourse of East and Central Asia.

Local Governance in Asia encapsulates my primary research agenda of adapting the Networks and Organizations paradigm to the study of political networks and institutions. This paradigm was first developed in the 1990s to study firms and markets, but I believe it may be tailored to any organizational context. My team and collaborators apply Networks and Organizations frameworks to a wide range of political systems and cultures in Asia:

  • South Korea & Taiwan, to compare the development of local elite networks in East Asia’s most successful Third Wave Democracies
  • North Korea, to examine the dynamics of elite conflict, managment and succession across the three Kim regimes
  • Kazakhstan, to grapple with the odd balance of power struck between Tokayev and Nazarbayev following the January 2022 protests

Informal political structures can be incredibly difficult to uncover and measure. To do this, I employ a broad spectrum of analytical methods ranging from network ethnography and interviews to statistical modeling, social and semantic network analysis, and computational text analysis.

Political Discourse in Asia encapsulates my secondary research interest of developing Semantic Network methods and theory. Recent and ongoing projects model:

  • North Korean Human Right Discourse in South Korean Media, and emphasize the strong influence of domestic partisan politics
  • Official Coverage of Qandy Qantar in Kazakhstan Media, analyzing subtle differences between government-supported outlets in the wake of the January 2022 protests

Career

I am currently an assistant professor of Asian Studies at National Chengchi University in Taipei. At NCCU I hold a tenure-track position in the College of Social Sciences and am affiliated with the International Doctoral Program in Asia-Pacific Studies (IDAS).

Prior to my current position, I was an assistant professor of social science at KIMEP University in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Before beginning my PhD, I was a data analyst for a Honolulu-based analytics consulting firm, SMS Research, and a program officer for the non-profit, Mercy Corps.

My predoctoral training also includes a B.S. in mathematics from Arizona State University and an M.S. in statistics from the Ohio State University.

Interests

We tend to think of ourselves as modern people living in modern times. However, so-called modern society is replete with identities and relations resembling pre-modern tribalism and patriarchy.

Are these merely the vestiges of path dependence, evolution and habit, or are they neo-traditional innovations, adapting age-old solutions to modern problems? And how do various actors implement or contest neo-traditional authority when it conflicts with modern norms?

My research explores neo-traditional authority from a structural perspective, in the specific place and time of contemporary Asia.

But beyond the here and now, what did neo-traditional politics look like, centuries ago, in the early modern era, and what might it look like in the years to come, as humans reach for the stars?

For speculative glimpses into our possible pasts and futures, I turn to science fiction, historical fiction, noir, Russian and East Asian literature, comic books, video games and the newly emerging field of astrosociology.

I also appreciate the affinities between the speculative world-building of nerd culture and genre fiction, and the structural (network) analyses of the social sciences.

Bio

I was raised in Tempe, Arizona and consider myself a native Arizonan. I came of age in South Korea and have spent much of my adult life in Seoul.

In 2008 and 2009, I spent six months in North Korea monitoring a USAID food program. Over the years I have lived in Almaty, Chengdu, Columbus, Heber, Honolulu, Kaohsiung, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Seoul, Sinuiju, Taipei and Tempe.

I speak fluent Korean, conversational Chinese, and have recently embarked on Russian.