Teaching Areas

Law and Society, Historical Methods, Social and Cultural Theory, Sociology of Knowledge and Culture, Political Philosophies of Law and Justice

Other Affiliations

• Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program (ACAM)
• Law and Society Minor
• Science and Technology Studies
• Faculty Associate, Social Justice Institute

Research Areas

Colonial Legal History; Critical Theory, Race and Racism; Affect; Time and Temporality; Oceans and Maritime Worlds; Settler Colonialism and Migration; Colonial India and the Diaspora; More-than-human Worlds

Research Interests

My research is organized along two trajectories.

The first meets at the interface of critical theory and legal history. To date, my work has aimed to write histories of colonial dispossession aimed at Indigenous peoples and restrictions imposed on “Asiatic” migration (from China and India, in particular) as conjoined and entangled colonial legal processes that are central to the politics of settler colonialism, historically and in the contemporary moment. My first book, Colonial Proximities (2009), details legal encounters between Indigenous peoples, Chinese migrants, Europeans, and those enumerated as “mixed race” along Canada’s west coast. The book considers how state racisms were produced and mobilized through land, law, and labour in sites of colonial re-settlement and offers a critical engagement with Foucault’s conceptualization of biopolitics.

My second book, Across Oceans of Law (2018), traces the currents and counter-currents of British/ colonial law and Indian radicalism through the 1914 journey of the S.S. Komagata Maru, a British-built and Japanese owned steamship. The book draws on archival research conducted in Canada, India, and the U.K. It reorients the ship’s passage away from the optics of immigration, nationalism, and landfall that have been so persistent, towards a global and maritime legal history. By following this one ship through time and space, the book draws the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans into a single analytic frame, and in so doing, explores the entanglements between transatlantic slavery, efforts to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their lands and waterways, Indian indenture, and “free” migration.

My current book project, Enemies of Empire: Commerce and Confinement in Colonial India, Burma, and Siam, 1914-1920, may be read as a sequel to Across Oceans of Law. Focused on the Ingress into India Ordinance and the Foreigners Ordinance, the book examines how colonial officials sought to redraw and control maritime and land-based borders between India, Burma, and Siam during the World War I period and beyond. In September 1914, as authorities anticipated the arrival of the Komagata Maru, Lord Hardinge, the Governor-General of India, signed the Ingress into India Ordinance which granted local police and magistrates unprecedented powers to arrest and detain Indian men returning from abroad. The ordinance was ostensibly aimed at so-called seditionists from Punjab but was used more widely, criminalizing merchants and traders in India, Burma, and Siam. To document the coercive effects of the Ingress, including the devastating consequences it had for families, I present a legal history through family biography. The protagonists of this story include four Muslim brothers from Gujarat who were living and working along the Burma-Siam border and seeking new economic opportunities beyond the impositions of caste. Under the auspices of war-time security, the Ingress granted colonial authorities the ability to criminalize trading families, thereby expanding the imperial carceral state and creating new “enemies of empire” in the process.

My second set of interests, “legalities of nature,” coalesce at the juncture of science, law, and history. I have written a series of articles on law and nature through parks and place. A central concern has been the ways in which colonial violence has been imposed and legitimized through racial, legal, civic, and state claims to nature, identity, and wilderness.

I have written a series of essays and articles exploring the legalities of nature the appropriation of holometabolous insects as labouring bodies in contemporary geopolitics. Focused on global food production, climate change, and forms of war, this project draws from anticolonial writings and postcolonial theory and places them into conversation with the philosophy of time, movement, and change in the work Henri Bergson.

Recent Awards

2022-2029

• Canada Research Chair (Tier 1)

2023

• Killam Research Prize

2020

• Winner, Association for Asian American Studies History Book Award  – Across Oceans of Law
• Finalist, Socio-Legal Association (U.K.) Theory and History Book Prize – Across Oceans of Law

2018-2023

• SSHRC Insight Grant, “Enemies of Empire: A Socio-legal History of Piracy.”

2015-2017

• Hampton Research Grant Award, “Insect Jurisprudence.”

2015-2016

• Wall Scholar, Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.

2015-2016

• Dean of Arts Faculty Research Awardfor Across Oceans of Law. The Faculty of Arts issues four awards per year, two at the Assistant/Associate level and two at the Full professor level, to allow research faculty one semester to concentrate entirely on research without teaching or administrative duties.

2014-2015

• Killam Teaching Prize for Graduate Instruction – One Killam Teaching Prize is awarded annually to a faculty member at UBC, in recognition of excellent graduate-level teaching.

Books

2018 Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Durham: Duke University Press). Read the Introduction here 

• Winner, Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in History (2020)
• Finalist, Socio-Legal Association (U.K.) Theory and History Book Prize (2020)

2009 Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921  (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press).

Edited Volumes

2024 Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Imperial Life Worlds. co-edited with Antoinette Burton and Samantha Frost (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

2020 Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times, co-edited with Antoinette Burton (Duke University Press).

2019 Unmooring the Komagata Maru: Charting Colonial Trajectories, co-edited with Rita Dhamoon, Davina Bhandar, and Satwinder Bains (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press).

Special Issues

2019 “Worlds at Home: On Cosmopolitan Futures,” Journal of Intercultural Studies, 40(5), co-edited with Sheila Giffen & Christopher Lee.

2014  “Indian Ocean Circuits of Law,” Law and History Review, 32(4), co-edited with Iza Hussin.

Select Articles and Book Chapters

2024. “Gale,” in C. Shaw and E. Turpin (eds.), The Work of Wind: Sea (Berlin: K. Verlag), 256 – 281.

2023. “The Law of the Sea: Oceans, Ships, and the Anthropocene,” in P. Burdon & J. Martel, The Routledge Handbook of Law and the Anthropocene (Routledge), 115-129.

2023. “The Pandemic and Two Ships,” in C. Stychin (ed.), Law, Humanities, and the Covid Crisis (London: University of London Press – with Mikki Stelder), 159 – 182.

​2022 “Oceans as Method,” in L. Lambert (ed.), The Funambulist, “The Ocean: From the Black Atlantic to the Sea of Islands,” 16 – 19.

2022 “The Slave, the Ship, the Legal Person,” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, 87: 19-42.

2022 “Navigating Colonial Law in a ‘Sea of Islands,’” Law and Social Inquiry, 47(1): 355- 361.

2022 “From Migrants to Revolutionaries: The Komagata Maru’s 1914 ‘Middle Passage’,” in W. Walters, C. Heller, and L. Pezzani (eds.), Viapolitics: Borders, Migration and the Power of Locomotion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 58-83.

2021 “Unruly Oceans: Law, Violence, and Sovereignty at Sea,” TWAILR: Third World Approaches to International Law Review (with Sebastian Prange).

2019 “From Slave Revolts to Social Death,” Theory and Society, 48, 835-849.

2019 “Introduction: Worlds at Home: On Cosmopolitan Futures,” Journal of Intercultural Studies, 40(5), 525-533 (with Sheila Giffen & Christopher Lee).

2019 “Worlds at Home: An interview with Sneja Gunew by Christopher Lee and Renisa Mawani,” Journal of Intercultural Studies, 40(5), 638-647.

2019 “Postcolonial Legal Studies.” In S. Stern, M. Del Mar, and B. Meyler (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities (Oxford University Press).

2019 “The Politics of Empire: Minor History on a Global Scale.” In R. Dhamoon, D. Bhandar, R. Mawani, and S. Bains (eds). Charting Imperial Itineraries: Unmooring the Komagata Maru, 1914-2014 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press).

2018 “Ships at Sea,” in P. Tortell, M. Turin, & M. Young (eds.). Memory (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press).

2018 “Insect Wars: Bees, Bedbugs, and Biopolitics,” in A. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Law and Theory (Routledge).

2018. “Archival Legal History: Towards the Ocean as Archive,” in M. Dubber and C. Tomlins (eds). Oxford Handbook of Historical Legal Research (Oxford University Press).

2016. “Law, Settler Colonialism, and ‘the Forgotten Space’ of Maritime Worlds.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 12, 107-131.

2016 “Criminal Accusation as Colonial Rule: The Case of Gurdit Singh.” In G. Pavlich and M. Unger (eds.), Accusation: Making Criminals (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press), 73-99.

2015 “Insects, War, Plastic Life.” In B. Bhandar and J. Goldberg-Hiller (eds.). Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou (Durham: Duke University Press), 159-188.

2015 “Law and Migration Across the Pacific: Narrating the Komagata Maru Outside and Beyond the Nation,” A. Perry, K. Dubinsky, and H. Yu (eds.), Within and Without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 253-275.

2015 “Bee Workers and the Expanding Edges of Capitalism.” In L. Lambert (ed.), The Funambulist Papers (Punctum Books). Read an online version here.

2015. “Law and Colonialism: Legacies and Lineages.” In A. Sarat and P. Ewick (eds). Law and Society Handbook (Malden: John Wiley and Sons), 417-432.

2015 “The Times of Law.” Law and Social Inquiry, 40(1), 253-263.

2014 “The Travels of Law: Indian Ocean Itineraries,”(co-authored with Iza Hussin). Introduction to Forum Issue, Law and History Review, 32(4), 733-747.

2014 “Patterns of Empire and the Politics of Comparison,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 34(3), 618-625.

2014 “Law as Temporality: Colonial Politics and Indian Settlers,” University of California Irvine Law Review, 4(1), 101-130.

2014 “Sovereignties in Dispute: The Komagata Maru and Spectral Indigeneities, 1914.” In S. Dorsett and J. McLaren (eds.), Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagements, and Legacies (London: Routledge), 107-123.

2012 “Racial Violence and the Cosmopolitan City,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30(6), 1083-1102.

2012 “Law’s Archive,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 8, 337-365.

2012 “Specters of Indigeneity in British Indian Migration, 1914” Law and Society Review, 46(2), 369-403.

2010 “‘Half-Breeds,’ Racial Opacity, and Geographies of Crime: Law’s Search for the ‘Original’ Indian,” Cultural Geographies, 17(4), 487-506.

2010 “On Postcolonialism and Criminology,”(co-authored with David Sealy). In K. Kramar (ed.), Criminology: Critical Canadian Perspectives (Toronto, Pearson).

2009 “The Sociological Imagination and its Imperial Shadows,” Theory, Culture, and Society, 26, 228-249 (with Thomas Kemple).

2008 “Cross Racial Encounters and Juridical Truths: (Dis)Aggregating Race in British Columbia’s Colonial Contact Zone,” BC Studies (Special Issue on ‘Refracting Pacific Canada’), 156/157, 141-171.

•  Reprinted in A. Mathur, J. Dewar, and M. DeGagne (eds), Cultivating Canada. (Aboriginal Healing Foundation Research Series, 2011). 

2007 “Legalities of Nature: Law, Empire, and Wilderness Landscapes in Canada,” Social Identities, 13(6), 715-734.

2006 “Screening out Diseased Bodies: Immigration, Mandatory HIV Testing and the Making of a Healthy Canada.” In A. Bashford (ed) Medicine at the Border: Disease, Globalization, and Security, 1850 to the Present (London & New York: Palgrave), 136-158.

2005 “Genealogies of the Land: Aboriginality, Law, and Territory in Vancouver’s Stanley Park,” Social and Legal Studies, 14(3), 315-340.

•  Reprinted in E. Darian-Smith (ed), Ethnography and Law (London: Ashgate, 2007).

2004 “From Colonialism to Multiculturalism?: Totem Poles, Tourism, and National Identity in Vancouver’s Stanley Park,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, (Special Issue on Law, Literature and Postcoloniality) 35(1-2), 2006, 31-57.

2004 “‘Cleansing the Conscience of the People’: Reading Head Tax Redress in Multicultural Canada,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 19(2), 127-151.

2003 “Imperial Legacies (Post)Colonial Identities: Law, Space, and the Making of Stanley Park, 1859-2001,” Law/Text/Culture, 7, 98-141.

• Reprinted in D. Ferreira Da Silva and M. Harris (eds), Postcolonialism and the Law (Routledge, 2017).

2003 “Island of the Unclean: Race, Colonialism, and ‘Chinese Leprosy’ in British Columbia, 1891-1924,” Journal of Law, Social Justice, and Global Development, 1, 1-21.

2003 “Legal Geographies of Aboriginal Segregation in British Columbia: The Making and Unmaking of the Songhees Reserve.” In C. Strange & A. Bashford (eds), Isolation: Places and Practices of Exclusion (London & New York: Routledge), 173-190.

2002 “In Between and Out of Place: Mixed-Race Identity, Liquor, and the Law in British Columbia, 1850-1913.” In S. H. Razack (ed.), Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (Toronto: Between the Lines), 47-69.

2002 “‘The Iniquitous Practice of Women’: Prostitution and the Making of White Spaces in British Columbia, 1898-1905.” In C. Levine-Rasky (ed.), Working Through Whiteness: International Perspectives (New York: SUNY Press), 43-68.

2002 “Regulating the Respectable Classes?: Venereal Disease, Gender, and Public Health Initiatives in Canada, 1914-1935.” In J. McLaren, R. Menzies, & D. E. Chunn (eds.), Regulating Lives: Historical Essays on the State, Society, and the Individual (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press), 170-195.

• Winner of the Hilda Neatby Prize (best article contribution to Women’s History) from the Canadian Historical Association, 2003
• Reprinted in A. Glasbeek (ed) Moral Regulation in Canada, (Canadian Scholars Press, 2006).

2000 “In Between and Out of Place: Racial Hybridity, Liquor, and the Law in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century British Columbia,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 15(2), 9-38.