Profile

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Professional experience

Research

My research generally revolves around marginalised and/or disadvantaged peoples, including issues of poverty, inequality, social exclusion, disadvantage, discrimination, and social conflict, and how these are affected by various patterns of economic growth, modes of social policy provisioning, and aid. This includes a sub-specialisation in population studies and demography, which I draw upon as a lens to understand new forms of poverty emerging within the context of rural-urban transitions, and an applied focus on China. Parallel to this, I also work on the macroeconomic repercussions of aid and on the history of economic development thought. With regard to China, the theme of polarisation and marginalisation has been the inspiration for my work on Chinese regional development strategies in Western China and their exclusionary and conflictive repercussions on minority groups (particularly in Tibetan areas, which encompass five provinces). I started this research after living and working with Tibetan refugees in India and Nepal for seven years and gaining fluency in Tibetan, after which I began my PhD and have since been actively researching in the area, including almost two years of accumulated fieldwork in Western China. More recently, I have expanded this research on China by also engaging with issues related to China?s integration into the global economy and I have used a similar analytical lens to engage in debates on international development policy more generally, particularly with respect to placing the discussion of poverty within a broader context of social policy and the political economy of development. I am also currently developing collaborations with a network of scholars from the South on the theme regarding the conditions necessary for instituting a progressive shift in current social policy regimes in the Global South, away from the residualist and targeted emphasis in current social protection agendas, towards more universalistic paradigms. This research initiative starts from the historical recognition that major progressive institutional shifts in social policy in the past have mostly only occurred under conditions of extreme stress or threat, and questions the degree to which such shifts can be instigated today without such extreme conditions. Academic credentials aside, I have twenty-five years of experience working in or on developing countries, including substantial experience with development practice and field experience in Central America, South Asia and China.

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Teaching

Courses