The Informal Paradox in Urban E-Waste Economies

Examines electronic waste processing and housing precarity in Accra, Ghana, to evaluate circular economy frameworks that neglect the social pillars of sustainability. Mapping these transnational material flows reveals the informal paradox: informal labor provides essential livelihood opportunities and recycling mechanisms but drives toxic circular economies while remaining structurally excluded, unprotected, and targeted by state interventions.  

Informal Infrastructuring and 21st-Century Urbanization

Analyzes how bottom-up community efforts and informal practices configure, build, and maintain cities in response to state absence and structural neglect. Theorizing informal infrastructuring as a defining feature of global urbanization highlights how residents actively construct vital physical and social networks to sustain everyday urban life.  

Transformative Cohabitation in Critical Mineral Extraction

Investigates the labor arrangements, spatial precarity, and community impacts surrounding cobalt and copper extraction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This project advances transformative cohabitation as an intervention framework to restructure relationships between artisanal miners, industrial mining firms, and the state, mitigating structural harms in global supply chains.  

Extractivism, Geopolitics, and Urban Informality

Analyzes how state competition over critical materials and transnational waste flows reshapes land use, infrastructure, and urban governance. This project investigates how macro-level resource strategies and geopolitical friction influence everyday livelihoods and spatial dynamics across rapidly growing cities.