Research Areas
Agrarian Political Economy; Agroecology; Anticolonial and Decolonial Theories; Anti-Systemic Movements; Critical Agrarian Studies; Critical Development Studies; Critical Security Studies; Development Geographies; GIS, Global Political Economy; Historical Sociology; Imperialism; Migration; Militarism and Counterinsurgency; Mixed Methods; National Liberation Movements; Philippine Studies; Political Ecology; Southeast Asia; Third World Marxism; Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL); World-Systemic Historical Materialism; World-Systems Theory
Dissertation
Rice and Resistance: Land Reform as National Liberation in the Philippines
Ph.D. Dissertation (in progress)
This dissertation investigates the relationship between neoliberal development and land reform in the Philippines through a study of the political economy of rice. Once a net rice exporter in the early 1980s, the Philippines had, by 2010, become the largest rice importer in the world. Such a reversal drives two interrelated questions: How did this happen, and what does it reveal about the structure of peripheral capitalism in the Philippines?
Through this lens, the project examines how the class character of development in the Philippines is revealed in struggles over rice, land, and space. That is: whose vision of development shapes the economy—elite and compradorial interests seeking to maintain a liberalized, export-oriented model centered on urban growth and land speculation, or peasant and working-class movements demanding genuine agrarian land reform and national industrialization?
It analyzes how this conflict plays out through three interlinked processes:
(1) rice liberalization, which dismantles state protections and exposes farmers to volatile global markets; (2) land reclassification, which enables elites to evade redistribution by converting farmland for commercial and infrastructure use; and (3) elite-led infrastructure projects that reconfigure both rural and urban spaces—turning former rice lands and U.S. military bases into logistics corridors, special economic zones, and real estate enclaves.
Together, these strategies work to disperse the agrarian question, bypassing demands for redistribution and deepening dependency—while reinforcing a neoliberal development model that remains disarticulated, externally oriented, and socially exclusionary.
Focusing on four provinces in Central Luzon—Nueva Ecija, Bulacan, Tarlac, and Pampanga—the project traces how the Philippine state disperses the agrarian question rather than resolves it. These sites are not only historically tied to rice production but are increasingly central to speculative land conversion, infrastructure corridors, and spatial realignments under the Greater Capital Region.
Following Orisanmi Burton's framework in Tip of the Spear, I use “the resources of academic scholarship to rigorously elaborate a genealogy of knowledge production that today largely remains criminalized, pathologized, and intentionally hidden from public view.” This study contributes to critical agrarian studies, world-systems theory and dependency theory, and anti-systemic movements literature through ethnographic fieldwork, discourse analysis, and archival research,
My research questions are:
What mechanisms have elite interests used to maintain land control across political transitions?
How does the ND Movement's vision for agrarian transformation differ from government approaches?
How did KMP emerge and evolve as an organization?
How has KMP engaged rice cultivation as a site of agrarian struggle?
Methodological Training
My research engages with agrarian political economy, critical development studies, and world-systemic historical materialism (WSHM), focusing on the contemporary agrarian question in peripheral social formations. My methodological approach combines:
Indigenous Filipino methods and Ethnographical Methods (Multi-sited, Participatory Action Research; Qualitative, NVivo, ATLAS.ti)
Spatial Analysis and GIS (ArcGIS, Story Maps)
Historical and Archival Methods
Political Science Methods, Quantitative Political Analysis (SAS, STATA, SQL)
Data Visualization and UX Design (Illustrator, Tableau)
Professional Associations
American Anthropology Association
American Association of Geographers
American Sociology Association
International Studies Association