Adam Hasan

I am interested in the emergence of the contemporary logistics economy and the geoeconomic forces shaping U.S. critical material supply chains. I examine these dynamics through a spatial history of late-Cold War era geoeconomic policy and infrastructure development along the Gulf Coast, a key hub for global circulation. My dissertation project, Supply Chain Empire: Constellations of Struggle on the Shores of Circulation, focuses on the anti-apartheid movement to trace the transatlantic Black radical movements that sought to undermine this imperial geography through spatial interventions upon logistical sites where capital and resources circulate.

My research trajectory has moved across regions and topics, linked by a sustained interest in how histories of conflict, racialization, and political economy are embedded in space. My original dissertation project explored the geoeconomic lives of cryptocurrency users facing infrastructural breakdown and the afterlives of war 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 spent time as an archival researcher for Volumes VIII (1963) and XI (1966) for the King Papers Project at Stanford’s Martin Luther King Institute. Across these projects, I have drawn on ethnography, participant observation, critical GIS, survey research, and archives to investigate the entanglements of race, place, and political economy.

With Sibahle Ndwayana, I co-organized the Afterlives of Fanon Research Collective (AFRC) through UC Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix and Townsend Center for the Humanities. This research collaboration brought together scholars from across UC Berkeley’s campus to foster critical conversations, programming, and scholarship on issues related to the political afterlives of Frantz Fanon’s thought and praxis. On May 10, 2024, AFRC hosted 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 and the University of Bergen’s Habitable Air Project.

I like to visit infrastructure, cook, and play golf. I am originally from East Tennessee and have roots in Palestine the Texas Gulf Coast.