Hello!

My name is Adam Hasan.

I'm a researcher, writer, and geographer interested in how global economic systems are built, who controls them, and what happens when they fail.

The official story of how supply chains, infrastructure, and commodity markets work is told from the center. My research starts at the edges, where that story is still being written.

I'm an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at UC Berkeley, where I study the relationship between global logistics systems and the regional economies they run through. I am experienced across archival research, survey design, geospatial modeling, and on-the-ground fieldwork in places where conventional data sources don't reach.

My dissertation follows 150 years of Gulf Coast ports, commodity markets, and bulk supply chains, tracing how forces of global circulation transformed one region, and how that region came to anchor the logistical infrastructure of the U.S. economy. Its central argument shows that finance and logistics co-evolve: capital rechannels risk, and infrastructure follows. These dynamics shaped the modern global economy, and they are still unfolding today.

My interest in the economy's edges has led me other places, too. In 2022, I spent two months in the mountains of southern Lebanon documenting a community of cryptocurrency miners navigating an economy coming apart at the seams. My Pulitzer Center-funded investigation, based on investigative fieldwork and a national survey of Lebanese crypto miners, mapped the informal capital ecosystem that emerged when the state could no longer keep the lights on. Novel financial technologies are reshaping physical infrastructure and redistribute political power in places where official systems have already failed.

As an economic geographer, I am fascinated by these unruly frontiers and critical sutures of the economy: where official systems fail, where capital forges new routes, where the map stops matching the territory.