Drawing upon 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, my dissertation project examines how contemporary impacts of uneven development such as forest fragmentation, human-primate conflict, and land governance disputes mutually converge as a series of capitalist frictions and tensions in Malaysia. Widespread forest fragmentation now has put human communities in novel ways of active contact with long-tailed macaques, dusky langurs, white-thighed surilis, fireflies amongst other species actors I study.

On the ground, through ethological sampling methods and street side conversations, I’ve shadowed local citizen scientists in peri-urban neighborhoods as they contend with competing and contradicting urban development models. As local property conglomerates exacerbate forest fragmentation, Malaysia’s secondary forests are earmarked as luxury housing markets that speculate and yield financial investments rather than providing immediate housing security needs. In this contemporary context, I study how local scientists must now negotiate between competing agendas such as ecological research, community-based conservation, and corporate funding streams.

Using Malaysia’s human-primate and human-firefly interfaces as comparative examples, I trace how scientists mobilize environmental data to speculate patterns of ecological risk and prescribe policy solutions to absorb and buffer drivers of economic loss in urban green spaces. Overall, primate and firefly ecological data are not just animal sociality representations but also serve as 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

• 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 “Breakdown and Reconfiguration” at Cornell University, Kahin Center for Advanced Research in Southeast Asia in October 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.