Academic Engagement

Secretary-Treasurer  (2024-2026)
CIES (Comparative and International Education Society) https://cies.us/about-cies/
Global Migration Special Interest Group

 Advisory Board
Project AfDevLives: The Afterlives of Development Interventions in Eastern Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique) PI: Yonatan N. Gez
https://afdevlives.iscte-iul.pt/  
AfDevLives studies the legacies of development interventions and their long-term impact on local communities. Exploring links between the past, the present, and the future, it revisits interventions’ representational and material remains from below, as experienced and re-appropriated locally over time. The selected candidate will develop methodologies related to oral history, storytelling, and narratives about the afterlives of development in line with the project’s objectives. I support the core team’s research and together with other team members, partake in the creation of a new phenomenologically inspired participatory approach designed to reflect the close connection between people and their physical environment.

Visiting Scholar
Integration and Belonging Hub, Clark University
https://www.clarku.edu/integration-and-belonging/
The Integration and Belonging Hub is an initiative formed within Clark University’s Department of Sustainability and Social Justice. Its mission is to foster migrant and refugee-inclusive communities locally, nationally, and globally through student learning, community engagement, and research and policy analysis. The Integration and Belonging Hub views our dynamic societies and the mobile people among them (refugees, asylum seekers, migrants and others) as “integrating together“ and seeks innovative approaches for creating shared worlds. The IBH aims to cultivate a new generation of practitioners and scholars and to develop frameworks to support multi-directional processes of social cohesion.
The establishment of the IBH is a response to the need to involve migrants and refugees as a vital part of 21st-century transformation in the face of significant social, economic, political, and environmental strain. While our work overlaps with other efforts to address structural marginalization and inequality, we do so primarily through the lens of people who move and the need to accommodate mobility for social cohesion. Integration research and practice highlights the urgency of updating our view of societies as sedentary receivers of migrants, and instead involve them as key participants in sustainable development.

Assistant Editor, former co-editor
NEOS: A Publication of the Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group
https://acyig.americananthro.org/neos/
NEOS is the flagship publication of the Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group (ACYIG), American Anthropology Association. This open-access, bi-annual publication consists of peer-reviewed original short-form research articles as well as editor-reviewed commentaries and feature pieces. We publish research on childhood and youth from scholars working across the four fields of anthropology, as well from those interdisciplinary fields in conversation with anthropological theories and methods. Articles published in NEOS undergo a double-blind peer-review process and commentaries are reviewed by the NEOS Editorial Team.

Associate Researcher
PDRI: Penn Development Research Initiative
https://pdri-devlab.upenn.edu/
The Penn Development Research Initiative (PDRI) – DevLab@Penn brings together faculty and graduate students from 7 schools across the University of Pennsylvania whose research seeks to identify solutions to the challenges facing developing countries. PDRI-DevLab seeks to foster impactful international development research by harnessing the expertise of its affiliates from various disciplines and utilizing diverse methodological approaches. PDRI-DevLab serves as a launchpad for extramurally-funded research projects that include collaborations with international NGOs, local NGOs, and government agencies while also serving as an intellectual hub for Penn faculty and graduate students conducting research in developing countries.

Associate Researcher
Penn GSE Ethnography in Education Research Forum
https://www.gse.upenn.edu/academics/research/center-urban-ethnography-education-forum
Convened by the Center for Urban Ethnography at Penn GSE since 1980, the Ethnography in Education Research Forum is internationally recognized for its encouragement of original and in-depth ethnographic research on education broadly defined, within and outside the context of schooling. The Forum provides a space for ethnographers in a range of disciplines and fields to come together across generations to share and learn from each other and, in so doing, to become part of a broader intellectual community. The Forum is committed to advancing systematic, rigorous, and engaged inquiry and to involving students in all phases of the meeting.

Associate Researcher
Partition Displacements
https://partitiondisplacements.com/about/
This project explores the mass displacements of the late 1940s in South Asia and Palestine. These were two of the most significant displacements in modern history. The 1947 Partition of India created the biggest migration in recorded history, as up to 15 million people fled across new borders. The following year, the establishment of the state of Israel on 78% of Palestine caused the longest-lasting refugee crisis in modern history, with more than three-quarters of the Palestinian population expelled. The two crises had some striking parallels. Both occurred in the context of hurried British withdrawal, and both were shaped by colonial structures, rising variant nationalisms, and the imposition of new borders. Crucially, both mass migrations posed a challenge to the emerging post-war system of global governance dominated by Western powers. As such, these histories can inform us not only about these regions but also about the emergence of post-WW2 internationalism and the refugee regimes that were established at this time. 

Associate Researcher
The Childhood, Law and Policy Network (CLPN), Queen Mary University of London
https://www.qmul.ac.uk/clpn/about/
The Childhood, Law, and Policy Network (CLPN) brings together scholars and practitioners researching social, political, and legal issues relating to children and childhood. Through the exchange of cross-disciplinary knowledge and resources, it provides an online hub for research, teaching, and policy. Convening the network is a team based at Queen Mary University of London. It is directed by  a.nd was created with the assistance of Dr. Yulia Ioffe and Dr. Violet Odala. The development and design of this website were made possible by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Grant reference AH/S004874/1, ‘Rethinking Child Law and Policy’).