Research Statement

My research is driven by a core commitment to building a more just world by understanding how relationships of power shape experiences of environmental and social inequities. I contribute to this goal through in-depth qualitative and ethnographic research that disentangles the complex, layered narratives of policy, infrastructure, and lived experience – particularly as they affect underserved and marginalized communities. My approach is rooted in community-engaged research, emphasizing the knowledge, strategies, and resilience of those most directly impacted by structural inequality. By centering local perspectives and lived realities, I aim to inform policies and practices that are responsive, context-specific, and socially transformative. 

Research Accomplishments 

My research identity has been built on a methodological commitment to qualitative and ethnographic inquiry, paired with a theoretical focus on how infrastructure and power can both entrench and challenge injustice. My work explores how communities navigate social, political, and ecological systems that were not designed with their wellbeing in mind. 

My early research focused on the socio-spatial lives of street dogs in urban Turkey and India, contrasting these with dominant constructions of dogs as stray, feral, or out-of-place in U.S. cities. For my master’s thesis, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews in Istanbul and Boston to explore how dogs’ relationships to urban space reflect broader cultural norms, state interventions, and forms of control. In Istanbul, street dogs are recognized as legitimate members of the urban community, often fed and cared for by their human neighbors. In contrast, U.S. cities typically frame dogs outside homes as problems to be fixed – stray dogs that need to be returned to owners or feral dogs that need to be “rehabilitated” – an approach which reshapes urban ecology through exclusion and control. These questions of belonging, infrastructure, and access initially led me to pursue multi-species urban research in Pune, India, following residents and the street dogs they fed and cared for. 

This inquiry evolved into a larger exploration of how power and infrastructure mediate access to urban resources for both street dogs and human slum residents. Although my original fieldwork in India was halted by the COVID-19 pandemic, I continued this line of inquiry in the U.S., drawing on qualitative data collected through a water access study I had previously supported. My dissertation focused on the historical roots and contemporary realities of infrastructural exclusion across five regions in the United States: Puerto Rico, the Black Belt, California’s Central Valley, Texas colonias, and Appalachia. In each case, I examined how colonialism, racism, extractive economies, and policy neglect shaped both the physical absence of infrastructure and the mistrust that communities hold toward government solutions. In Alabama, a health department official described a septic tank program as a benevolent intervention met with resident resistance. But community members and nonprofit advocates revealed deeper issues: heir property laws rooted in slavery-era policies, prohibitive costs due to soil conditions, and limited access to professional installation. These narratives complicate top-down assumptions about behavior change and illustrate the importance of designing policies informed by on-the-ground knowledge and structural history. Across all sites, residents were not merely recipients of infrastructure but active interpreters, navigators, and critics of the systems that shape their lives.

Intellectual Interests and Future Trajectory 

One of the most distinctive strengths I bring to my research is the ability to work across topical areas while maintaining a strong theoretical and methodological core. Across projects, I have prioritized community-engaged approaches that center local knowledge, respect lived experience, and co-create insights with research participants. From urban street life in Turkey and India to rural and agricultural communities in the U.S., my research has consistently applied political ecology and environmental justice frameworks to understand how people adapt to systems not built for them. As I wrap up participation in the Terra.do Climate Change: Learning for Action fellowship, I aim to carry this approach forward in future research opportunities, with a deepening focus on the intersection of infrastructure, governance, and environmental change. I am particularly interested in how marginalized communities adapt to infrastructural precarity (including through informal water systems, alternative land tenure arrangements, or multispecies care practices) and what these adaptations reveal about the limits and possibilities of state-led resilience initiatives. 

My immediate research priority is to develop my dissertation into a book manuscript that reframes water access and infrastructure as sociological issues of equity, belonging, and environmental governance. Building on my postdoctoral experience, I plan to expand this work by analyzing the social dimensions of climate adaptation in food and water systems. Through follow-up interviews with water sector representatives, nonprofit leaders, and rural residents in California’s Central Valley and Texas colonias, I will examine the tensions between agricultural production and the marginalized rural and peri-urban communities who sustain it amid increasing climate stress. 

Longer term, I intend to explore the tensions within agriculture across the U.S. at the intersection of environmental justice and climate adaptation. This work integrates my dissertation, postdoctoral projects, and experience as a Terra.do fellow to examine how policy, economic drivers, and community networks shape agricultural decision-making, and how the sector simultaneously offers opportunities for sustainability while contributing significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. Methodologically, I will continue to pair ethnographic fieldwork with participatory research partnerships, positioning communities as co-producers of knowledge. 

Finally, I plan to bring an international comparative lens to this research by returning to my pre-pandemic fieldwork in India, which examined access to urban space and resources through the experiences of slum residents and street dogs. My initial research was focused in part on Pune because it was one of India’s original “Smart Cities” – a government scheme promising citizen-friendly and sustainable cities through the provision of core infrastructure and “smart” solutions, including adequate water supply, assured electricity supply, robust IT connectivity and digitalization, efficient urban mobility and public transport. Smart Cities like Pune expose the tensions between state visions of "smart" urbanism and the lived experiences of residents. These cities illustrate how top-down planning can erase, ignore, or exacerbate existing social and political inequities. With my history studying infrastructural violence in the context of water access in the United States, I am able to return to this project from a more comparative lens, drawing on my knowledge of urban infrastructural regimes across national borders to better understand how planning paradigms produce both inclusion and exclusion. 

Broader Impacts 

Taken together, my research agenda advances sociological scholarship on environmental inequality, infrastructure, and resilience while engaging directly with policy and practice. By centering community voices and applied, participatory approaches, my work bridges academic and practitioner worlds—translating critical theory into actionable insights for those addressing inequities in infrastructure, food, and water systems.