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.

My first major research project examines state-making and environmental justice in Southeast Asia. My book investigates these issues from the vantage point of small farmers, provincial officials and grassroots activists struggling for land and democracy in Myanmar. This work has also produced special issues on resource frontiers in Myanmar and political ecology in Southeast Asia and 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? I led a research project on small farmers and big tech in Myanmar and two interdisciplinary research groups: one focused on digital transformations in property and development, the other on the ethics and practices of algorithmic conservation. I am a co-I on a new project that asks about how carbon farming markets take shape and reshape agriculture in the Global South.

My latest work takes a global view of rural change, theorizing agrarian modernities and investigating environmental and social transformation in the Mountain West.

Throughout these projects, I incorporate innovative methodologies that emphasize participation, collaboration, and mixed methods.