My research agenda centers how people, communities, and institutions interact with the changes in physical environments that occur with development and climate- and non-climate-related hazards. This includes how local-level political and policy processes affect patterns of development and disaster management, and how the natural and built environments affect political and policy-related processes, like trust in state and non-state actors and community mobilization, in turn. For this reason, my substantive work draws from multiple disciplines, frameworks, and levels of analysis, and I routinely work with those outside of the social sciences. Likewise, my methodological work involves questions of interdependence, measurement, time, and robustness. I have ongoing solo-authored and collaborative projects on highly localized gender quotas, ‘active’ citizenship and electricity, social dimensions of earthquake early warning systems, hydropower governance, survey research, and networks. Some of my research has been published in Global Environmental Politics and Disasters.

The focus for the remainder of my postdoctoral fellowship is to advance my book project as a number of my solo and collaborative working papers are finding their ‘homes.’ The book investigates the politics of disasters through a subnational design in three urban centers of the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal drawing from seven years of in-country and remote research, including observation, archival work, semi-structured interviews (n = 140), and a household level survey (n = 1800). The stand-alone papers that accompany the larger project ask how residents participate in processes of coproduction and investigate patterns of responsibility attribution.