As an interdisciplinary scholar across social psychology, queer theory, and Asian/American studies, I’ve focused my research on global social movements and the critical theories about racial and queer subjectivities. As our living environment shifts towards an increasingly complex and interconnected global reality, the singular particularity of the “individual” that Western psychology assumes and presumes becomes more contested. To theorize new social conditions of neoliberal globalization, postmodernity, and neo-imperialism, I depart in my research from the psychological cognitive universalism, and reconceptualizes the individual as a political agent participating in the material, institutional, and discursive global social processes.
To carry out such a departure, I am primarily interested in these three questions across my research projects: 1) How does global capitalism and neo-empires transform racial, gendered, and sexual subjectivities across the psycho-social levels in the US and Asia Pacific? 2) What are the historical and political contexts in which psychology as a scientific discipline produced normalizing notions of identity such as immigrant, race/ethnicity, and LGBTQ as well as the linear, stagist models of identity development such as acculturation and internalized homophobia? 3) What are the modes of governance, sovereignty, self-determination, and notions of temporality expressed through the vibrant social movements and across the contested borders in Asian societies?