Featured Research

In the early 1980s, new real estate magnates began building suburbs, or new towns, and an emergent middle class began purchasing tract housing and spending their free time in malls. As the finance economy grew in the late 1980s and early 1990s, city planners strategized new ways to open up central city land markets, ushering…

Local governments throughout Central and Eastern Europe have faced a number of struggles in their dual transformation towards democratic governance and a market economy. Many post-Socialist cities face deindustrialization, declining populations, and limited incoming investment; however, some cities have weathered these challenges more effectively than others. Matthew Stenberg’s dissertation research examines the ways that important…

Jenny Zhang researches education, development interventions, and textual practice in Indonesia. Her research takes me to two sites: a densely-populated area in North Jakarta, and a rural area in Eastern Indonesia. In both places, she meets with teachers, parents of students, school administrators, development workers, and community members, to better understand how education works, what…

This research focuses on the origins and effects of a housing policy called Baan Mankong (“Secure Housing”) in Thailand. The goal of Baan Mankong is to give poor urban residents threatened with eviction the opportunity to gain legal access to land as a community. Hayden’s research looks into how a variety of different actors, from…

This research focuses on the “re-socialization” programs for those incarcerated in Rio de Janeiro’s prison system. These programs work to reform and transform the lives of the imprisoned by providing narratives of the future, narratives that build on broader notions of a “reformed” city and nation free of their perceived social ills. Yet they also…

This research focuses on the restructuring of homeless regulation in the American city from 1983 to the present through ethnographic and archival methods. The project deploys a unique double-edged enactive ethnography in the city of San Francisco. He lived alongside those experiencing homelessness in encampments, shelters, and residential hotels, and also worked alongside bureaucrats, activists,…

This research focuses on the complex and often tense relationships between individual refugees and the legal and humanitarian apparatuses put in place to serve them. Amelia focuses on communities of urban refugees living in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, most of whom lack official refugee status. She investigates how individual refugees and refugee communities build and…