Research Topics
RESEARCH
For over three decades my research has explored how Germany’s layered, difficult pasts reshape the present, from how the desire to be “normal” after unification drove early decisions about the use of the German military abroad, to the uneasy place of former East Germany as its material culture turned into memory, to current debates over the memory of the colonial past.
For over a decade I have explored the city of Shenzhen as a unique space that links the national and the global in an ongoing speculative project that has indelibly transformed China’s identity, economy, and urban landscape. In related work on China I have examined the politics of infrastructure, of model making, and the emerging social credit system.
Beyond my work on postsocialist Germany and post-Mao China, I recently co-edited, with Michal Murawski, a book on urban inheritances of socialist modernity across today’s “Global East,” from Crimea to Cairo, Moscow to Mumbai. In the early 2000s I collaborated with the sociologist David Stark at Columbia University on a major NSF-funded project on how digital technology was influencing newly emergent civil society in Central and Eastern Europe.
The economic zone is also a cultural, rather than exclusively economic, phenomenon, and my research explores its genealogy as a space of urban modernity in Asia and beyond. I offer a new theoretical approach to the zone as an urban form—the Ex City—that combines classically modernist fantasies with contemporary logics of accumulation.
Much of my earlier research focused on the changing nature of state power, transnational migration, transatlantic relations, and foreign and security policy.