Projects

Current Projects

Resilient Communities Built on Farmer Flourishing, 2024-2025

The world needs more farmers committed to climate-resilient practices—but they often face enormous social, environmental and policy challenges to maintaining productivity and profitability. This project advances community-engaged research in Orange and Durham Counties to better understand the policy, environmental, and social factors that support farmer flourishing within climate-resilient local food systems. The project will leverage interviews, focus groups, and community convenings with local farmers and policymakers as these counties draft, revise and implement new land use and climate action plans.

This project collaborates with the Duke Campus Farm and the World Food Policy Center. It is funded by the Duke Climate Research Innovation Seed Funding and receives additional support from Duke University's Office of Durham and Community Affairs and the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies.

Ten Mothers Farm, Cedar Grove, North Carolina

PACES: Making migration and migration policy decisions amidst societal transformations, European Research Council, 2023-2026

I am an associate partner and lead researcher in the PACES consortium, funded by Horizon Europe and coordinated by Simona Vezzoli (ISS). PACES is an innovative, inter-disciplinary and multi-level research project that offers a groundbreaking approach to studying and understanding people’s decisions to migrate. Knowledge and understanding of people's decision to migrate is critical for policymakers' ability to develop migration policies. The EU-funded PACES project focuses on two parallel research components: the factors shaping migration decision-making and the mechanisms supporting migration policies. The project will combine theoretical and empirical knowledge from several academic disciplines and methodological paradigms to systematically investigate the interactions between migration decisions, policies and broader social transformation. PACES will draw on data collected in Algeria, Ethiopia, Italy, Libya, Nigeria, Slovakia and Spain to elaborate a heuristic model that identifies different constellations of conditions that influence decisions to stay and migrate at various stages of individual life trajectories and migrant journeys. For more information, see here.

Past Projects

Rural Development and the Capability to Stay, Social Science Research Council, 2021-2024

Funded through the SSRC's Scholarly Borderlands Initiative, this project explores how alternative approaches to development might increase capabilities to stay and flourish in rural areas. Together with interdisciplinary co-PIs based in Uganda and Israel, our activities and outputs include a virtual speaker series titled Rural Transformations; two expert workshops with academics and development practitioners at Duke University (Summer 2022) and Makerere University (Fall 2023); and qualitative fieldwork to learn from an organization employing participant action research for community-driven development in rural Uganda. For more information about the project, see here.

Wilhelmina Reuben Cooke Culturally Responsive Pedagogies and Practices Project, 2023-2024

As a Wilhelmina Reuben Cooke Fellow, I worked with the inaugural cohort of Global Justice and Equity Fellows to organize a conference focused on advancing the understanding and practice of community-engaged research. Featuring Duke-based researchers and local practitioners, conference sessions included an exploration of multidisciplinary understandings of equity and justice, best practices for community-engaged research, and a case study of university-community partnerships to address food insecurity among the LatinX/Hispanic community in Durham. Videos of panel events can be found here.

Climate Change Foresight Research: Evaluating Climate-Related Migration Forecasting Models, United States Agency for International Development, 2022, link

Climate change will have significant impacts on all aspects of human society, including population movements. In some cases, populations will be displaced by natural disasters and sudden-onset climate events, such as tropical storms. In other cases, climate change will gradually influence the economic, social, and political realities of a place, which will in turn influence how and where people migrate. Planning for the wide spectrum of future climate-related mobility is a key challenge facing development planners and policy makers. This report reviews the state of climate-related migration forecasting models, based on an analysis of thirty recent models. We present the key characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses of different modeling approaches, including gravity, radiation, agent-based, systems dynamics and statistical extrapolation models, and consider five illustrative models in depth. We show why, at this stage of development, forecasting models are not yet able to provide reliable numerical estimates of future climate-related migration. Rather, models are best used as tools to consider a range of possible futures, to explore systems dynamics, to test theories or potential policy effects. We consider the policy and research implications of our findings, including the need for improved migration data collection, enhanced interdisciplinary collaboration, and scenarios-based planning.

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