About

I am a geographer and sociologist with 16 years of experience in research and teaching in Canada and the Philippines.

I completed my PhD in Geography at York University in January 2026, where I remain affiliated as a research associate with the York Centre for Asian Research. I hold an MA (distinction) in Sociology from the University of Manchester, and a BA in Sociology from the University of the Philippines Diliman.

I work on urbanization in the Philippines to theorize two thematic areas: the transformation and rise of urban, rentier class based on embedded land inequality and a globally-deployed workforce; and new forms of state territoriality and class politics arising from ecological and urban crises.

Methodologically, I employ critical discourse analysis and critical accounting to follow ideas and money geographically, and to sociologically situate both within institutional contexts.

I have taught and designed undergraduate courses on contemporary issues in the Philippines, cities in the global South, and the global economy, both at UP Diliman and at York.

I maintain an interest in the overlaps between research, public due diligence, and investigative journalism. My work has been featured by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Talk of the Town, and as a special report on ABS-CBN News.

kennethcardenas@gmail.com
ORCID: 0009-0009-8090-7190
Profiles on Google Scholar, Academia, and Researchgate.

My PhD is about the new geographies of class power. I am paying specific attention to the diversification of the largest Filipino conglomerates from 2000 to 2025.

In it, I make a case for

• considering legacies of the 20^th century in the global South as if they were diverse and uneven;
• paying attention to continuities between plantation political economies and ongoing concentrations of urban wealth, as unaccounted for by theories of neoliberalism, financialization, or gentrification; and
• making urban comparisons not just across places, but also across periods and commodity relations.

In the process, I aim to shed light on ongoing resurgences of class power in societies like the Philippines: Southern, structurally-adjusted, middle income, and urbanizing, with newly-energized oligarchies and weak, captive states; markets where the next trillions in profits are to be made; places that are so far off the theoretical maps of restored class power.

I have published work on this theme with Geoforum (2025) and Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints (2024); as book chapters in Mobilities of Labour and Capital in Asia (Cambridge, 2020) and States of Fragmentation: the Philippines in Transition (Focus on the Global South, 2014); in a catalogue for the exhibition Living Spaces: Hyperreal Estate and the Architecture of Dispossession, curated by Alice Sarmiento (2017); and as a full-page Sunday op-ed with the Philippine Daily Inquirer (2014).

On 26 September 2009 Tropical Storm Ondoy dumped 454 millimeters of rain on Manila, a month’s worth of rain in one night. The massive “once in a century” floods it triggered focused public attention on issues of urban growth and form, climate change, and ecological crises.

It also triggered ongoing processes of definition and control of unwanted urban populations, which I studied in depth for my masters at the University of Manchester, and the repurposing of routines, subjectivities and ideologies of counterinsurgency for the management of disaster risk.

I have published work on this theme with Asia Pacific Viewpoint (2025) and International Journal for Urban and Regional Research (co-author; 2019), and as an op-ed with ABS-CBN News (2009).

I am active in organizing diaspora scholarship. For the Filipiniana collection development project of the Philippine Studies Group at York University, I coordinated the acquisition of 108 titles for donation to York University Libraries.

As part of the organizing committee of a 2023 conference on the political economy of the Philippines’ Martial Law period and the 2022 restoration of the Marcoses, co-convened by the Department of Sociology, Mindanao State University and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University.

I was also a co-convenor of Alitaptap Collective (2017–2018), a network of overseas Filipin@ students for mobilizing critical research and building transnational solidarities. As part of this effort, I collaborated with the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism for a special report on the Rodrigo Duterte administration’s China deals.

I breathe and observe at godblessmytrip.tumblr.com, where I put more energy into speculative fiction and creative non-fiction, about landscapes, cancelled futures, and political imagination.

A few other things, unsorted for now:

Two premises: For political imagination, and for varieties of possibility.
Paminsanang pagsasalin / occasional translations.
Pakikipagsapalaran
Personal decolonization, as an ongoing effort while I work and live in the traditional territory of Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and The Huron-Wendat and Wyandot Nation.