Adam Hasan

I am interested in the complex spatial entanglements of imperialism and everyday economic life. I locate my research within political economy, agrarian studies, Black geographies, and postcolonial theory to ask questions about how novel financial technologies are acting in and being transformed by economic geographies shaped by empire. My research speaks to the often unexpected and contradictory ways multi-scalar forms of sovereignty come to be contested, renegotiated, and performed through dynamic relationships between the state, non-state actors, infrastructural systems, and imperial powers.

My current project explores these topics ethnographically through the social and economic lives of cryptocurrency users in an agrarian region of southern Lebanon. Previously, my undergraduate thesis explored the spatial politics and racialized antagonisms of post-apartheid memorials to Gandhi in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Before my PhD, I also worked as an archival researcher for the King Papers Project at Stanford’s Martin Luther King Institute.

With Sibahle Ndwayana, I co-organize the Afterlives of Fanon Research Collective (AFRC) through UC Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix and Townsend Center for the Humanities. This research collaboration brings together scholars from across UC Berkeley’s campus to foster critical conversations, public programming, and scholarship on issues related to planetary decolonization and the political afterlives of Frantz Fanon. On May 10, 2024, AFRC will be hosting the Decolonization and Afterlives of Fanon Conference, co-sponsored by the Berkeley Black Geographies Project, Center for Race and Gender, Social Science Matrix, and Townsend Center for the Humanities.

My work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study, the Pulitzer Center, and the Morehead-Cain Foundation. I am affiliated with UC Berkeley’s Black Geographies Project as well as the University of Bergen’s Habitable Air Project.

I am originally from East Tennessee and have roots in Palestine and the Texas Gulf Coast.