Rachel Brown

My research addresses migrant labor and political economy in the context of colonialism. I look at gendered forms of labor such as care and domestic work and ask about the relationship between labor markets and racialization. I do this through an interdisciplinary approach that includes political theory, ethnography, settler colonial studies and critical labor studies. I am also interested in how labor, financialization, and political economy shape Indigenous, migrant, and citizen resistance to displacement. Much of my work is regionally focused on the Middle East, which I examine through a comparative, translational lens. I also look at transnational feminist mobilizations against externally imposed economic policies and collective responses to debt. My most recent project asks how colonial relations of credit/debt are extended or repurposed by aid industry interventions focusing explicitly on “gender empowerment,” and how communities respond to the imposition of debt.