Alexa is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Her work sits at the intersection of critical environmental studies, the anthropology of capitalism and agriculture, Global South Indigeneity studies, and feminist development studies. Prior to Stanford, she received an MSc in Gender from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her doctoral research has been supported through a Fulbright Fellowship as well as Stanford’s King Center and the Center for South Asia.
Alexa has conducted ethnographic research with an all-women, Adivasi (Indigenous)-majority agricultural cooperative in central India, as well as with activist, NGO, and government networks across the subcontinent. Her dissertation examines how people – farmers, NGO workers, government officials – in the midst of agrarian crisis, imagine and enact agrarian futures in South Asia through collective institution-building and sustainable farming practices. She focuses on how Adivasi communities aspire through and beyond these projects and on the ways gendered institutional forms and divisions of labor structure their implementation. She finds that these enmeshed ecological and economic sustainability projects are built through historically emplaced and contested desires for autonomy of land, collective, labor, and personhood.