How are climate and energy policies created and enacted? How do political pressures, governance contexts, and ‘best practices’ shape how ‘problems’ are framed and ‘solutions’ imagined? Whose voices matter most in these processes, and how are tradeoffs managed amid competing preferences?
These questions drive my research agenda. I am a sociologist interested in climate and energy governance and the social implications of climate interventions and the green energy transition. Across my research on offshore wind in the United States, urban climate planning in India, and international climate governance, I examine the tradeoffs inherent in responding to the climate crisis. I am particularly interested in the gaps that emerge between the principles of climate and energy justice, planning ‘best practices,’ and the practical realities of planning and implementing interventions.
Currently, I am a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. My research centers on the politics of offshore wind development in southern New England, focusing on the place of commercial fishers in this part of the green energy transition. Through qualitative fieldwork, I examine how compensation programs and competing notions of conservation shape understandings of fairness and justice in the planning and construction of offshore wind. I consider how energy justice ideals are negotiated in practice and how future development might better align with principles of a just energy transition.
I have also conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in India, where I analyzed the creation and implementation of climate-focused plans in megacities. Focusing on the actors involved in this work and the politically charged and bureaucratically constrained environments in which climate policies are developed and implemented, I examine how institutional and political conditions shape climate action and how international ‘best practices’ are applied locally.
With colleagues at Brown University’s Climate and Development Lab, I have also conducted research at the United Nations climate negotiations, analyzing climate finance for adaptation and loss and damage through a climate justice lens.
Beyond academic work, I have contributed to policy-focused publications on urban climate vulnerability with the World Resources Institute and on international climate adaptation policy with the International Institute for Sustainable Development.
I received my PhD and master’s degree in sociology from Brown University. Before graduate school, I taught English in Tajikistan through the Fulbright Program. I earned my bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of Kansas, where I also minored in economics, philosophy, and Russian.
