Drawing upon 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, my dissertation project examines how the contemporary 'shock externalities' of uneven development such as land-use governance conflicts, flooding, housing insecurity, and human-primate conflict are broader reflections of Malaysia's New Economic Policy urban planning (1971-1991). Through ethological sampling methods and streetside conversations, I trace how local citizen scientists grapple with the hegemony of speculative urbanism and state developmentalist ambitions. By juxtaposing the scales of infrastructural megaprojects and their multispecies entanglements, I critically examine how postcolonial Malaysia’s urban green spaces become futuristic-oriented laboratories where conservation, speculative property valuations, and development risks mutually converge.

Through hundreds of hours in ethological sampling trips and street side conversations with local scientists, I closely unfold how Malaysia’s human-primate and human-firefly interfaces shape contemporary land-use governance conflicts. Particularly, collaborating with local citizen science projects, I examine how free-ranging primate bodies, physiologies, economic valuations, and cultural histories intersect within Malaysia’s plantation economy. Overall, I trace how primate and firefly ecological data as comparative framings shape not only nonhuman sociality representations but most importantly speculative policy tools that access and contend with financial risks in urban development.

My dissertation fieldwork is supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation (Gr. 11070), the Royal Anthropological Institute Emslie Horniman Award, High Meadows Environmental Institute Hack Award, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), amongst others. As a firm believer of public-participatory dimensions in making science accessible, I collaborate with environmental organizations through local partnership-based models. My journalistic bylines have been cited in Animals, Science, Routledge Studies on the Political Economy of Asia, and more. First-generation scholars and/or scholars based in the Global South are more than welcome to email me (kym@princeton.edu) if they have any questions on graduate school applications.

The body is a theory of the world. Immersion, through lived experience, is one of the earliest referential points in shaping how we navigate society. Deeply inspired by this, in my free time, I’m training for the 2027 Copenhagen Marathon and the 2027 Generali Berlin Half Marathon.

Some things I’ve been recently working on:

• Partaking in the 2026 AAA Op-Ed Project, a mentorship program for anthropologists to transform their research into journalistic bylines

• Giving a public lecture on scientists and the consulting gig economy at Monash University Malaysia’s SASS Research Seminar Series in August 2026.

• Presenting a paper on property valuations and green urbanisms at the Urbanization Beyond the City: The Making and Mobility of Concepts from Southeast Asia Workshop at Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore in September 2026.

• Presenting a paper in the conference “Money and Ecology: Rethinking Value, Exchange, and Sustainability” at The Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies, Lund University in November 2026.

• Presenting a paper on dialectical primatology, class politics, and the material conditions of primate sociality at the American Anthropological Association (AAAs) Conference in November 2026 (virtual).