Areas of Research
Academic Profession and Professional Lives
How do people build meaningful academic and professional lives within higher education? I examine the lived experiences, identities, and professional trajectories of faculty, students, and higher education professionals, with particular attention to legitimacy, belonging, professional becoming, care, loss, and the relationship between personal and professional lives. Across studies of women academics, foreign-born faculty and student affairs professionals, and graduate and professional students, I am interested in how people make meaning of institutional conditions and negotiate continuity and change across their careers and lives. This strand provides the lived and relational foundation for my broader work on mobility, institutions, and inequality.
International Mobility and Global Higher Education
How do cross-border mobility and changing political and institutional conditions reshape educational and professional possibilities? Building on my interest in academic and professional lives, I examine how mobility across national and institutional contexts changes what people understand to be possible. My work addresses internationalization, academic migration, and the ways immigration policy, geopolitics, and institutional responses shape the opportunities available to internationally mobile students and scholars. I increasingly connect individual trajectories with broader questions about global academic talent flows and the geopolitics of knowledge production.
Institutions, Inequality, and Change
How do higher education institutions reproduce, negotiate, and sometimes transform unequal conditions? Across my work, institutions are not simply settings in which individual experiences occur, but active sites where broader social, political, and transnational pressures are interpreted and translated into practice. I examine gendered structures in the academic profession, institutional responses to crisis and political change, student affairs practice, and processes of internationalization. I am particularly interested in how organizational actors navigate changing environments and how these responses shape the experiences and possibilities of students, scholars, and professionals.
Critical and Creative Qualitative Inquiry
How can qualitative research better capture experiences and processes that unfold across time, relationships, and changing institutional contexts? Critical and creative qualitative inquiry cuts across all of these substantive areas. My methodological work draws on narrative, arts-based, multimodal, participatory, dialogic, and trajectory-based approaches to examine forms of meaning-making that can be difficult to capture through conventional accounts. I approach research design as an intellectual and epistemological choice, with particular attention to what becomes visible, whose knowledge is centered, and how experience is represented. I am especially interested in methods that make room for temporality, ambiguity, affect, contradiction, and relationality.