Adam Hasan

I am interested in the complex spatial entanglements of imperialism and everyday 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 political lives of cryptocurrency users in an agrarian region of South 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.

My work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, 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 Tennessee and have roots on the Texas Gulf Coast and in Palestine. If you are considering applying to UC Berkeley or geography programs more generally, please feel free to reach out!