My research is on democracy, corruption, and politics mainly in the Philippines, although I’ve also written about Singapore, Cambodia, and the United States.

I have several projects ongoing. Primarily, I’m writing a monograph on the “illiberal turn” in the Philippines. Here I focus on people’s experience of democracy and how it has changed over time and seek to situate this experience socially and historically. This work has appeared in Democratization, Social Forces, Qualitative Sociology, and International Sociology.

My second project is on corruption. I aim to develop a distinctly sociological approach to corruption centered on the idea of corruption as socially and historically embedded. My collaborators and I have an edited volume called The Sociology of Corruption currently under review. I’m also working on a book of essays on corruption, democracy, and postcolonial theory based on the Philippine experience.

Third, I’m editing a volume on historical and ethnographic approaches to Philippine politics. The aim here is to get away from the tendency to conceptualize Philippine politics around a set of “bad words” (oligarchy, patronage, corruption).

In general, I’m interested in social transformations in the Global South, Southeast Asia particularly, and my research focuses on the Philippines, Cambodia, and Singapore. Topically, I study democracy, corruption, urbanization, segregation, social inequality, and “populism” (a term I dislike). Theoretically, I spend a lot of time thinking about how political institutions structure experience and how experience shapes political subjectivity, the relation between social and spatial boundaries and when inequality comes to be felt as stigma, and what freedom means sociologically. I’m committed to theorizing “from the Global South,” or reconstructing conceptual categories in light of Southern realities, and enthusiastic about sociology as a mode of explanation that can help us grasp aspects of reality that other modes (biological, psychological, economic) can’t.

My previous work looked at the relationship between the urban poor and middle class in Manila as located in slums and upper- and middle-class enclaves. I sought to connect this relationship with urban structure on the one hand and political dissensus on the other. In the process, I highlighted the role of class in shaping urban space, social life, and politics. I wrote a book on the topic, The Patchwork City, as well as several articles.