• Critical heritage studies:  sub surface cultural property
• Racial geographies: critical race,  Asian North American/Indigenous relationality
• Environmental / landscape history: land, territoryand empire
• Settler colonial studies: critical infrastructure, militarism and war
• Transitional justice: redress, reconciliation and judicial accountability in settler states
• Transpacific Oceanic Studies: Archipelagic and Oceanic studies, Arctic and Northern studies and Pacific Canadian studies 

I am a landscape architect and interdisciplinary writer with a focus in critical ethnic studies, legal geography and environmental history. My dissertation project is attentive to federal preservation policy and cultural heritage law as it intersects with unresolved Indigenous land claims/ Aboriginal title and Asian North American (Japanese American + Canadian) redress and war memory. I place my legal/geographic focus on two former U.S. territories (Hawai'i and Alaska) and unceded lands in Canada's westernmost province (British Columbia).

I study the politics of preserving sub-surface and surface ruins at three remote World War II confinement landscapes (or internment camps) in proximity to the urban centers of Honolulu, Juneau and Vancouver. I use a mixed-methods approach to study land and conduct hands-on site fieldwork (landscape inventory, architectural documentation, non-invasive field archaeology and gardening) to record and retrieve World War II era artefacts and ruins.

I couple this with archival research in pictorial (cartography and art) collections while also considering unarchived sources such as Native Hawaiian/ Alaska Native/ Coast Salish written, visual, performative, oral and lived experience of place. I combine ethnographic and visual analysis with legal analysis of speech acts (Antiquities Act presidential proclamations, executive and militarys orders etc.) and judicial/ quasi-judicial records (treaties, land title, redress and reparation bills, commissions of inquiry, and land restitution acts) across nation-states in the transpacific U.S. and Canada.