I am a global expert in arts and cultural policy studies, migrant youth, and creative labour and entrepreneurship in the Asia-Pacific. 

Before joining the National University of Singapore in 2022 as a Senior Lecturer, I was a Lecturer at RMIT University Vietnam and a Senior Research Fellow at The University of Melbourne. I am currently a Chief Investigator on two major Australian Research Council-funded projects, Vital Arts: Skilling Young People for their Futures and Indigenous Storytelling and the Living Archive of Aboriginal Knowledge. Both projects extend understandings of cultural value and cross-cultural collaboration in the creative industries. 

My book Art in Community: The Provisional Citizen (2015, Palgrave Macmillan), examines how community-based arts practices are shaped by contradictory policy agendas – to enable  mobile practices of citizenship and self-making while also contributing to defensive or bounded forms of community. The book foregrounds the concept of the ‘provisional citizen’– an unstable, enterprising figure who cultivates flexible ethical and political attachments in a world shaped by increasing cultural diversity and insecurity. My research on migrant youth extends these ideas by theorising the idea of ‘pragmatic belonging‘, and proposing critical approaches to youth leadership and empowerment.  

My current research is about fashion. In Bangladesh, Vietnam and Australia I have conducted case studies on ‘ethical fashion’ enterprises and wider forms of creative labour and activism. The research examines narratives of ‘crisis‘ in the fashion industry and how these are connected to transnational networks of creative production, gendered labour, and sustainability and decolonisation agendas. I am the co-founder of the Critical Fashion Studies research group. 

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