She trained as a hydrologist and has worked in China, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia and Singapore and with First Nations communities in Canada. Her research focussed on erosion, deforestation, agriculture before moving on to mathematical modelling of industrial and urban pollution. Concerned with the subjective process of how communities made decisions when faced with environmental issues, her research evolved to postcolonialism, and then to psychoanalysis and economics. She has published on the geographies of anxiety and territorialization and, more recently, on psychoanalysis, sovereignty and foreign investment in East Asia.