Biography

I was born in Singapore and received my first degree at the National University of Singapore (Geography, 2001).  I then joined the Wellcome Trust-funded Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis at NUS as research assistant, where I supported and initiated research projects relating to East Asian migration trends and population and social policies in Singapore.  Hoping to return to an early interest in environment-society relations and the politics of development in Southeast Asia, I left for the United States in 2004 to pursue a doctoral degree in human geography.  I received my Ph.D. in Geography at the Ohio State University in 2010.  My dissertation ‘Making the Mekong: Nature, Region, Postcoloniality,’ is a critical reading of how the economic and development region of the Mekong today has been shaped by colonial discourses and practices of development.

I have been fortunate to have developed research experience across diverse topics and development contexts in Southeast Asia (notably Singapore, Laos, Thailand).  My current research interests are situated at the intersection of economic geography, development, and nature-society relations.  I am interested in understanding how particular logics of development, progress, and economic growth come about, the environmental and geographical framings of such discourse, and the political and material effects of these logics.  I am interested in framings such as ‘region’, ‘environment’ and ‘watershed’ and how they embody and encase both political and economic interests and prescriptions of economic and political life.  I am fascinated with how the economic become infused with the non-economic, and the ways in which ideas about what is natural/human are at the core of ‘rational’ economic practices.  The processes of ‘globalising’ lives inadvertently connect places and events as disparate as the Cold War/Mekong River/the US south/Washington D.C./Shanghai.

Research Interests

• political economy of development in Southeast Asia
• postcolonial geographies and genealogies of colonial power
• nature-society theory, imperial natures

2012-2013 Courses

• FYSM 1101 [Location is Everything]
• GEOG 3024 [Understanding Globalization]
• GEOG 3404 [Economic Geography]

Publications

Wong, Theresa and Joel Wainwright (2009) ‘Offshoring dissent: Spaces of resistance at the 2006 IMF/World Bank Meetings’, Critical Asian Studies 41:3, 403-428.

Yeoh, Brenda S.A. and Wong, Theresa (2008) Over Singapore – 50 Years Ago, Singapore: Editions Didier Millet.

Wong, Theresa, Delang, Claudio and Schmidt-Vogt, Dietrich (2007) ‘What is a forest Competing meanings and the politics of forest classification in Thung Yai Wildlife Sanctuary, Thailand’, Geoforum 38, 643-654.

Delang, Claudio and Wong, Theresa (2006) ‘Livelihood-based forest classification systems of the Pwo Karen in Western Thailand’, Mountain Research and Development 26, 138-145.

Wong, Theresa and Yeoh, Brenda S.A. (2005) ‘Constructions of foreign labour migrants in a time of SARS: the case of Singapore’, in Santosh Jatrana, Mika Toyota and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (eds.) Migration and Health in Asia, Routledge Research Population and Migration Series, London: Routledge, pp. 61-78.

Yeoh, Brenda S.A., Wong, Theresa and Ho, Elaine (2004) ‘Transnational labour  migration, gender and social development in Southeast Asia’, in Gedeon M. Mudacumura and M. Shamsul Haque (eds.) Handbook of Development Policy Studies, New York: Marcel Dekker.

Wong, Theresa, Yeoh, Brenda, Graham, Elspeth and Teo, Peggy (2004) ‘Spaces of silence: Single parenthood and the normal family in Singapore’, Population, Space and Place 10(1): 43-58.

Yeoh, Brenda, Huang, Shirlena and Wong, Theresa (2004) ‘Gender and representation in geography: Singapore’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 28(1): 120-131.

Wong, Theresa, Ng Eu Khim, Yeoh, Brenda S.A. and H.T. Abdullah Khan (2003) ‘Migration and the ‘Asian’ family in a globalising world: a selective review’, in Johannes Pflergerl, Siew-Ean Khoo, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Verene Koh (eds) Researching Migration and the Family, Singapore: Asian MetaCentre, pp.10-33.

Xiang, Biao and Wong, Theresa (2003) ‘Commentary. SARS: Public health and social science perspectives’, Economic and Political Weekly 38(25): 2480-2483.