New Project

Community-Based Participatory Research with a Transformative Justice Program in Select CDCR Prisons

I recently began work on my next project: a multi-year, mixed methods study of a feminist curriculum currently being piloted in California state men’s prisons. Funded by a CDCR Innovative Programming Grant and overseen with two other principal investigators, Lindsey Beach and Hannah Curtis, this project will provide us with an unusual level of access to a transformative justice organization that centers community-based responses to interpersonal harm. Founded by two formerly incarcerated program alumni, the work will be conducted in community with the organization to examine how rejecting punitive solutions in favor of a transformative justice approach might work in practice towards building an abolitionist present and future.

Past Projects

My 2019 paper published in Demography, ‘Reexamining the Influence of Conditional Cash Transfers on Migration from a Gendered Lens,’ shows how popular cash-transfer welfare programs supported by the World Bank have curtailed women’s migration by conditioning receipt of benefits on the performance of feminized labor within the home. Drawing on the welfare state literature, the paper demonstrates how the welfarist international development regime works to discipline global subjects into proper laborers and families in ways that configure their bodies within the home and across national boundaries.

My work with Dr. Hedwig Lee on the opening chapter “#SayHerName: Why Black Women Matter in Sociology” published in The New Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives examines how both Anna Julia Cooper and Zora Neale Hurston became epistemologically erased as important alternative theorists in sociology and anthropology. In conversation with the growing Du Boisian intervention in sociology, the chapter takes a feminist standpoint to contemplate how our sociological ‘canon’ remains haunted by the erasure of their contributions.

I was lead author on the paper 'Family Obligation Attitudes, Gender, and Migration' published in the International Journal of Sociology in 2020. Finding that valuing parental caregiving intersects with migrants’ embeddedness in Nepal’s remittance economy, the study demonstrates how people attempt to negotiate the competing demands of labor migration and family caretaking by participating in proximate migrations that are less remunerative but geographically closer to home.

I also co-led authorship on another paper with Dr. Nathalie Williams titled 'When Does Social Capital Matter for Migration? A Study of Networks, Brokers, and Migrants in Nepal' published in International Migration Review in 2020. Engaging with theories on the influence of migrant networks on facilitating migration within communities of origin, the study elaborates on how social capital theories of migration fail to account for an increasingly dominant type of state-formalized migration facilitated by the booming migration brokerage industry.