I am a political sociologist specializing in international migration and governance.
Using ethnographic methods, I study the interaction between state and society in migration governance and its impact on state power and migrant lives. My projects include multi-sited research on labor migration governance in Thailand, forced migration in Southeast Asia, and refugee resettlement in the United States. I have a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles and am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab and Department of Sociology at Stanford University.
Research and writing
Labor migration governance
My first book project is a comparative ethnography of labor migration governance in Thailand, Southeast Asia’s most popular migrant destination. Examining a puzzling difference in how the state regulates migrant workers across locations – strict enforcement of document time limits in some and heightened control over spatial boundaries around rights in others – this project identifies forces from above and below that shape such variation and its consequences. Drawing from fieldwork and interviews with migrant workers from Myanmar, Thai state officials, employers, and intermediaries in two field sites, the study illuminates the dynamics of guestwork control and the corresponding ways that migrants organize their households and capacities for daily and long-term work. Through this ethnographic comparison, the book develops a framework for theorizing contemporary migration control and noncitizenship in a global context. This research was funded by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and International Institute at UCLA, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. A related article analyzing regulatory brokerage in Thailand’s guestwork system is published in Social Problems. A related collaborative project on the infrastructures of care and social reproduction for migrant workers along the Myanmar-Thailand migration corridor is funded by Stanford’s King Center on Global Development.
Forced migration governance and refugee resettlement
I also have longstanding interests in forced migration and refugee governance in Southeast Asia and the United States. An article in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies analyzes how ethnic social networks and institutions interact with state and international control structures to assist, move, and integrate refugees during a multistage migration process from Myanmar to Los Angeles via Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. My fieldwork on refugee migration and asylum seeking in Cambodia, Malaysia, and Thailand has contributed to reports and publications in the Journal of Refugee Studies and Sociology Compass, shorter pieces in the Diplomat and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research “Spotlight On” series, and a chapter for the book, Displacement: global conversations on refuge.
Currently, I am working on a qualitative project with Dr. Tomás Jiménez and the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University investigating how public-private collaborations shape refugee resettlement and integration processes.
Teaching
I’ve developed my pedagogy as a Teaching Assistant/Associate for undergraduate courses in classical and contemporary sociological theory and comparative immigration in the sociology department at the University of California, Los Angeles and more recently as a lecturer on Contemporary Immigration in Global Perspective in the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley. I have also mentored students in social scientific research and writing. These experiences have laid the foundation for an evolving teaching philosophy based on the core components of linking social theory to everyday life, collaborative learning, and writing practice.