Kai Yui Samuel Chan 

I am Samuel Chan, a Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University.

My research is motivated by the need to reimagine our futures with an eye toward the people, communities, and movements that traverse state boundaries. Towards this end, I write and teach about peoplehood, transnationalism, and methodological approaches. 

Peoplehood

My book project, Entangled Peoplehood, develops a theory of self-determination that takes political communities as entangled with rather than bounded from each other. Drawing from the legal histories of colonized, indigenous, and exiled peoples, I re-cast political communities as shifting webs of relationships (de-)stabilized and differentiated by political institutions, membership regimes, and territorial practices. In doing so, my project aims to build upon the relational tradition of self-determination and bring it to bear upon conventional theories of sovereignty, citizenship, obligation, and democracy.

Transnationalism

Persons, products, information, and pollutants cross or are stopped at state borders daily. In "Interpreting Borders", I contend that when political communities deploy borders to manage these transnational flows, they are also managing their relationships with other communities situated at the various interstices of these flows. In two separate papers, I investigate respectively the political obligations diasporic members hold towards their diasporic, home, and host communities. I am open to collaborative projects that shed light on the diasporic, labour, digital, and ecological currents that flow across state boundaries.

Methodological Approaches

Looking beyond (and beneath) the state requires us to re-orient our methodological approaches and ontological assumptions. Under the theme of deliberative democracy, I have written on the undemocratic assumptions of modernist social science and, in a different paper, discuss how we could think about politics systematically, contrasting functionalist and interpretive philosophies. I am currently working on a paper that advances our understanding of social practices.

Born and raised in Hong Kong, I received my undergraduate education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, before I completed my M.S.c in Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Ph.D. in Political Science at University of California, Berkeley.

Feel free to contact me at kaiyuisamuel_chan@fas.harvard.edu.