Charmaine Chua

Charmaine Chua is an acting Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley and is originally from Singapore. Her work concerns the global dimensions of Marxist political economy, postcolonial development, racial capitalism, and technological change, with regional interests in transpacific studies, Southeast Asia, and the US. Her research, teaching, and public engagement investigate socio-spatial reconfigurations of global capitalism from the late twentieth century to the present through a focus on global supply chains, the Transpacific logistics industry, policing, and of late, the racialization of housing and energy in the US. Her work is driven by a desire to advance our collective capacity to better understand the structural, yet constantly-shifting sources of harm and violence that prevent ordinary racialized and working people from flourishing, and to map these harms in service of anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggle. Her current research is specifically focused on how the rise of the logistics industry has reconfigured the contemporary relations between supply chain capitalism, race, and empire. She is currently writing two books on this question: The Logistics Counterrevolution, a history of the intersection of decolonizing struggles in Southeast Asia and the restructuring of supply chain capitalism, and How to Beat Amazon: The Struggle of America's New Working Class (co-authored with Spencer Cox). In 2023, she was named a Freedom Scholar in recognition of movement leaders who participate in academia with a demonstrated commitment to supporting social movements. She is also an associate editor for Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, the Chair of Campus Labor Organizing for the Council of UC Faculty Associations, and one of the founding faculty members for the Marxist Institute of Research