I am currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. My research centers meaning-making and power dynamics in international organizations. I am particularly interested in how international development and foreign aid are encountered in people’s everyday lives, and the meanings, divisions, and struggles that arise from such encounters.
I am a former Fulbright Scholar, Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow, and I’ve received grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the America-Japan Society, and the Center for Khmer Studies. I recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.
My work is published in Social Problems, Gender & Society, Sociology of Development, Gender, Work, & Organization, and Contexts. My first peer reviewed journal article, “Activist, Entrepreneur, or Caretaker?: Negotiating Varieties of Women in Development” won the ASA Section on Sex & Gender’s Sally Hacker Best Graduate Student Paper Award in 2019.
Currently, I am working on my first book project, which examines variation in ‘aid chains,’ or the links through which programs travel from donors to INGOs, and finally to implementing partners. Through a multi-sited ethnography, I examine two aid chains focused on the delivery of women’s health services in Cambodia, one originating in the United States and the other in Japan. The book argues that the gendered policies, political histories, and diplomatic priorities of the U.S. and Japan result in distinct development imaginaries that are manifest in the organization and dynamics of aid chains. I further show how each imaginary is translated into the Cambodian context with distinct outcomes for the content of programming and local stakeholders. Informing scholarly debates on global civil society and transnational advocacy, I contend that contemporary notions of ‘global best practice’ for INGO programming are in fact reflective of one development imaginary, the dominant one associated with traditional Western donors.