publications & research

My research centers on refugee resettlement, race and racism, ethnonationalism, citizenship, gender, feminism, urban anthropology, and qualitative research methodologies. Looking at local contexts and their particular histories as well as their connections to global processes, I study the ways in which groups and individuals shape one another.

current

I am on leave from Ball State for the 2025 fall semester, living in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and conducting research on women in public space.

books

articles

  • 2025 “Imperial Entanglements: Afghan Refugees and the Reimagining of Midwestern Identity in Muncie, Indiana.” Genealogy 2025 9(3) 79; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy9030079
    • This article examines how Afghan refugee resettlement in Muncie, Indiana challenges dominant narratives about both Midwestern homogeneity and refugee victimhood. Through research with Afghan refugees who arrived following the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, I analyze how everyday encounters between refugees and longtime residents reveal complex imperial connections. Drawing on Critical Refugee Studies, I argue that Afghan presence in the American Midwest is not incidental but directly produced by decades of U.S. military intervention. Cultural narratives that portray the Midwest as predominantly white are not only misleading but also fuel dangerous ideologies like nativism and white supremacy, which lead to anti-refugee and immigrant policies and practices that have dire consequences. By centering Afghan refugees within longer histories of imperialism, racialization, and migration, I demonstrate how face-to-face interactions produce unexpected alliances that question previously held ideologies and challenge U.S. empire. This work contributes to understanding how refugee integration collapses boundaries between foreign and domestic, revealing how empire fundamentally shapes citizenship, belonging, and regional identity in America’s heartland. 
    • Keywords: refugees; Afghanistan; war on terror; U.S. imperialism; Midwest; Middletown studies
  • 2025 “DeKeynesianizing Citizenship: Ballot Initiatives, the Tea Party, and the Cultural Politics of Taxes in Oregon.” Current Anthropology 66 (4) August 2025. https://doi.org/10.1086/736952
    • Right-wing anti-tax narratives are so pervasive today that it is easy to assume that they have been an inevitable part of conservative ideology, but transforming the economic interests of capital into popular opposition to taxes and redistributive policies has taken considerable work. In this paper, we show how taxation is a process of governance and socialization under late capitalism that has resulted in specific ways of seeing the world and responding to it. For decades, the anti-tax movement in Oregon focused primarily on property tax limitations through the ballot initiative process. Although policy victories were the top prize, anti-tax leaders recognized the opportunity that ballot measure campaigns offered to shape political discourse. Seeding and nurturing anti-tax narratives in the 1990s and early 2000s sowed the seeds for the Tea Party movement in the Obama and Trump eras. Highlighting the political-economic and cultural processes of “deKeynesianization,” we show how taxes serve as powerful symbols of the state and of different ideologies or attitudes about government, markets, public and private responsibilities, and individual and collective identities. This article interrogates various iterations of anti-tax, pro-business politics and helps to explain the polarized political culture of the contemporary United States.
  • 2024 “Teaching and Learning Urban Anthropology in Bosnia-Herzegovina” with Susan Brin Hyatt, *Jordan Keck, *Mendim Akiti, *Kiera Cromer, *Alejandra Ibarra, *Lanyang Zhou, *Kiya Mullins, and *Sparrow Cheng. Teaching Anthropology. *indicates student co-authors.
    • In the summer of 2019, two professors led seven students from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, in a high impact immersive learning course in urban anthropology in Bosnia-Herzegovina. They spent a week each in three different cities: the multiethnic, cosmopolitan capital of Sarajevo, the industrial and predominantly Muslim city of Zenica, and Mostar, an ethnically divided city that is also a tourist destination and home to the country’s largest corporations. Professors wanted students to understand that there are multiple ways of experiencing and representing urban cultures. They led classes on multimodal ethnographic methods and stressed the importance of place in ethnography. Students were also encouraged to apply their personal and academic background and interests to each of the cities. In this paper, they outline the course, provide reflections, and make the case that establishing a uniform structure for teaching multimodal anthropological methods while allowing for flexibility and student interests in assignments will result in better learning outcomes. Finally, we explain how the course leaned into the practice of “teaching uncertainty” as featured in Current Anthropology (2017) and encouraged students to see the ways in which uncertainty shaped the lives of Bosnians but also students’ own lives and cities.
  • 2017  Morgen, Sandra and Jennifer Erickson. “‘Incipient ‘commoning’ in defense of the public?: Competing varieties of fiscal citizenship in tax- and spending-related direct democracy.” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 79 (2017): 54-66.
    • By exploring Oregon tax and spending ballot initiatives from 1970-2010, this article outlines how anti-tax activists constructed a “taxpayer identity politics” that was consistent with neoliberal values. At the same time, progressive coalitions challenged the depiction of a narrowly-defined privatized, tax-burdened citizen with a publicly-minded fiscal citizen that cared about the “common good.” In explaining this discursive field, we introduce “incipient commoning” as a method that progressive coalitions deployed to influence conventional political and electoral processes. Incipient commoning offers a way to think emergent alternatives to the market and State as institutions, but which emerge from, and are related, to them. 
  • 2017  “Intersectionality Theory and Bosnian Roma: Understanding Violence and Displacement.” Romani Studies 27(1):1-28.
    • This article uses intersectional theory to explain violence against Romani women in post-war (1992–95) Bosnia-Herzegovina and the social marginalization of Bosnian Romani refugees in Fargo, North Dakota. I show how race/ethnicity, class, and gender are relational and become salient in different ways and contexts, but depend on overlapping institutional contexts and state histories to create limitations and possibilities with regards to marginalization and inclusion. Romani women in post-war Bosnia experienced high levels of violence because they were Roma, poor, and women. Understanding violence in this context meant interrogating how (post)socialism, ethnonationalism, war, and anti-Gypsy attitudes influenced Romani women specifically. Bosnian Romani refugees in Fargo were stigmatized due to racialized social practices, like early marriage and scrap metal businesses. Understanding marginalization in this context meant taking into account a history of racism against people of color in the United States, capitalism, and hegemonic expectations for refugees to assimilate into mainstream American culture.
  • 2012 “Volunteering with Refugees: Neoliberalism, Hegemony, and (Senior) Citizenship.” Human Organization 71(2):167-175.
    • Refugee resettlement in the United States relies on volunteers to aid in the resettlement process. Drawing upon research in Fargo, North Dakota during 2007-2008, this paper addresses the ways in which volunteers embraced and contested hegemonic forms of “worthy” citizenship. More specifically, I compare and contrast volunteer efforts of senior citizens who worked with refugees. Both refugees and senior citizens are marginalized in the neoliberal discourse of “worthy” citizenship that stresses economic self-sufficiency. Organizations that pair these groups can go a long way to challenge mainstream understandings of race, class, gender, culture, and age. However, I examine the unquestioned, even celebrated, power that volunteers have in refugee resettlement. While some senior citizens contest social inequalities, others serve as foot soldiers for hegemonic forms of citizenship that privilege Whiteness, Christianity, a Protestant work ethic, and gendered practices of care. I show how everyday interactions between volunteers and refugees served to form and solidify social hierarchies.
  • 2012  “Emotions out of Place?: Bosnian Roma in Fargo, North Dakota.” Etudes Tsiganes Special Issue: Emotion and Place: a Gypsy/Roma Account. Aspasia Theodosiou and Micol Brazzabeni, eds. 44-45: 102-115 (French version) and 150-263 (English version).
  • 2011  Erickson, Jennifer and Caroline Faria. “‘We want empowerment for our women’”: Transnational Feminism, Neoliberal Citizenship and the Gendering of Women’s Political Subjectivity in South Sudan.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36 (3): 627-652. Contribution was 50% for each author.
    • Following the signing of a 2005 peace agreement, connections between South Sudanese women in the diaspora and at “home” reveal new and gendered forms of female political subjectivity, citizenship, and activism. This article explores the emergence of transnational women’s organizing efforts through a focus on a 2008 conference held in Juba, South Sudan, and hosted by the U.S.-based South Sudan Women’s Empowerment Network (SSWEN). We describe the membership, mission, and goals of SSWEN, focusing on the challenges and opportunities in organizing as women across lines of class-, faith-, ethnic-regional-, and diaspora/home-based differences. We highlight the emphasis on spiritual notions of self-empowerment and feminized forms for activism in SSWEN’s work, which are prioritized as a way to gain wider inclusion and recognition in society and to promote grassroots care for the community. We suggest that these emphases may be viewed as potentially liberatory, offering new opportunities for engagement in a deeply strained and politically fragile period. However, we also point to some of the limits of this approach, highlighting the ways in which an emphasis on the self and the spaces of the home and body divert responsibility from the state for postconflict reconstruction, care, and the dismantling of patriarchal systems. Our work seeks to move beyond conceptualizations of refugee women as politically disengaged in the nation-building process, instead highlighting the dynamic, overt, and yet contested organizing work of women to promote gender equality in the new South Sudan.

book chapters

essays

Master’s Thesis: “Gendered Neglect: Romani Women in Post-War Bosnia-Herzegovina” (2004)

From 1998-2000, I worked for a local women’s NGO in Bosnia-Herzegovina founded as a response to violence against women during the 1992-95 war where I coordinated research on the prevalence and scope of violence and neglect against Romani women. After conducting more than 100 quantitative interviews and more than two dozen oral history interviews, our research team found that Romani women faced greater degrees of domestic and structural forms of violence than non-Romani women. We published our project in the Bosnian, English, and Romani languages. In the summer of 2003, I returned to Bosnia to complete research for my Master’s degree, in which I further explored the prevalence of multiple forms of violence, from individual to state-sponsored, throughout Romani women’s lives. I addressed the role of the state, local and international NGOs in regards to their (lack of) programs with Roma. My research in Fargo built on this work by comparing the experiences of Bosnian Roma and Bosnian ethnic Muslims (Bosniaks) in North Dakota.

Fellowships, Grants, & Awards

  • 2023 with Dr. Molly Ferguson. Virginia Ball Center Immersive Learning Grant. Ball State University, “Gender in Post-Conflict Zones,” to take Ball State students to Ireland, Northern Ireland, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Summer 2024.
  • 2021 Fulbright US Scholars Grant, The Good Life: Everyday Life in Postwar, Industrial Zenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina, spring 2022.
  • 2015 Provost Immersive Learning Grant, Riverside-Normal City: Portrait of a Middletown Neighborhood
  • 2012 Engaging Southern Sudanese: The Politics of Gender, Faith, and Political Organizing, ASPiRE, Faculty Research Grant Competition, Ball State University
  • 2010 Center for the Study of Women in Society Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship, University of Oregon
  • 2009 Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics Dissertation Fellowship, University of Oregon
  • 2008 National Science Foundation, Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant

Invited Talks

  • 2022  “Welcoming Refugees: Lessons from the Dakotas,” for the BSU International Women’s Group. February 14, 2022. Zoom.
  • 2021  “Seeking Refuge, Finding Community: Mobility, Context, and Global Refugee Flows” for “Big Question, Big Ideas,” Muncie Public Library and the Ball State Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. December 10, 2021.
  • 2021  “Race-ing Fargo: Mobility, Context, and Global Refugee Flows.” Invited talk by the University of Sheffield, the Migration, Integration and Governance Research Centre (MIGREC) Sheffield, England. Virtual presentation, April 12, 2021.
  • 2021  “Race-ing Fargo.” Invited presentation for North Dakota State University. March 2021.
  • 2021  “Race-ing Fargo: Refugees, Citizenship, and the Transformation of Small Cities.” Invited book launch talk for the African American Studies Program, Ball State University. January 29, 2021.
  • 2020  “Race-ing Fargo: Refugees, Citizenship, and the Transformation of Small Cities.” Invited panelist for “New People, New Places: The Changing Landscape of International Migration in the U.S.” Co-sponsored by the Master’s Program in International Migration Studies and Immigration Seminar Series at The Graduate Center City University of New York.

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