Dissertation Dust

On March 15, 2026, I submitted my dissertation manuscript. This collage is an exercise of meditation, a reflection on six years of (re)thinking my dissertation project, New Dispensations: Catholic Property, Global Capital, and the Making of the Transpacific. New Dispensations traces contemporary Catholic property regimes in the majority-Catholic capitals of Manila, Philippines; Hagåtña, Guåhan-Guam; and Díli, Timor-Leste.

To create this collage, I parsed through a patchwork of archival documents, marginalia, Notes app thoughts, task lists, GCal event reminders, screenshots, receipts, protest signs, ephemera, fieldwork flight paths, and WhatsApp messages taken over the course of August 2020 to March 2026. These fragments represent research across seven countries and territories (the Philippines, Guåhan-Guam, Timor-Leste, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Vatican City State) and nine languages (Tagalog, CHamoru, Tetum, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and English).

As I revisited the remnants of my research—housed across my phone, laptop, miscellaneous binders, notepads, boxes, and books—I saw how my initial frameworks for religious territoriality based on claims to bounded space failed to describe the ongoing financialization of Catholic property across Southeast Asia and Oceania. I set out to document the Church’s institutional appropriation of land in the colonial past, but discovered the Church’s active diversification of proprietary assets in the colonial present.