Articles & publications

I analysed how foreign encroachment and Qing decline birthed modern Chinese nationalism, then showed how Maoism turned it into a mass, socialist project anchored in anti-imperialism and Party loyalty.

I explored how South Korea’s blind-only massage licence, framed as protection, reproduced able-bodied privilege, a question that drew me to examine how law naturalises disability and debility through a sociological lens.

This historiographical essay explored how Anderson’s “American Era” framework shaped interpretations of Thai-ness as a state project, then showed through Ford’s work on the Sangha that identities were contested and renegotiated from below. I argue how Cold War historiography often elides agency of local actors, complicating top-down narratives of identity formation.

I analysed Bourdieu’s account of how people both make and are made by society, showing how habitus, field, and capital explained how social reproduction worked for Bourdieu, but also how his theory risked sliding back into determinism.

I wanted to explore the mechanisms of how authoritarian states build resilience in the digital age. I analysed China’s censorship regime and argued that, even under tight control, truth-telling operated as a bargaining tool within media “grey zones” and moments of citizen mobilisation, showing that censorship in a sophisticated authoritarian state is often more nuanced.

This essay explored John Rawls’ attempt to construct an impartial conception of justice through his principles of “justice as fairness.” I argued that while Rawls aspires to reconcile equality and liberty, his abstraction from material realities ultimately weakens his theory’s capacity to address real-world injustices.

Growing up within the Southern Vietnamese diaspora community, I was exposed to a lot of stories around the Vietnam War, but I never really understood it from the perspectives of the mainland. In this essay, I wanted to explore and properly appreciate the challenges of wartime memory and legacy.

I analysed Vietnam’s 2012 Labour Code and the wave of worker strikes that followed, showing how the state’s pursuit of “harmonious” labour relations often came at the expense of real collective rights.

I never really understood modern Vietnamese history and took this opportunity to research how early Vietnamese nationalism was constructed particularly at the turn of the century. I explored how colonial censorship and elitism shaped nationalist discourse.

The essay explored Carole Pateman’s claim that the social contract tradition was built on a hidden sexual contract, which confined women to the private sphere and sustained patriarchal power even within liberal democracies.

A short article comparing Foucault and Butler's understanding of subjectivity as a political problem. This is a shortform that looks at the underlying political theory of each of the thinkers' assumptions and beliefs.

I wrote this for my first year political theory class. In this essay, I engaged a few important debates particularly around Locke's conception of property rights i.e. Macpherson's Turf argument and Tully's rebuttal.