Questions about the governance of resources, the lived experiences of agrarian change, and the political economy of development drive my research. I am a feminist scholar whose commitment to social justice manifests in research questions that interrogate intersectional resource access; participatory methodologies that highlight marginalized voices; and public scholarship that advocates for more equitable policy. I use collaborative approaches and new digital methodologies (including critical remote sensing and social media analysis) alongside the traditional tools of interviews, ethnography, household surveys, and document review in order to understand environmental politics and uneven development in the digital age. My interdisciplinary research portfolio contributes to current debates in environmental studies, geography, critical data studies and global development theory and practice.

I’m currently working on two major research projects, both of which stem from long-term ethnographic work in Myanmar. The first examines state-making and environmental justice from the vantage point of small farmers, provincial officials and grassroots activists struggling for land during Myanmar’s democratic decade. This work has grown into a collaborative project that uses feminist methodologies to understand land, labor, love & revolution.

The second project incorporates grounded perspectives from the Global South into theorizations of development in the digital age. This work has included investigations of “smart” development projects, Facebook land markets, and biodiversity data, and asks the big question: how do digital technologies reshape existing land and resource politics?