I study how organizations manage internal tensions and external pressures, specifically when the groups inside them are deeply divided. My doctoral work focused on climate action in conflict zones, and my current work extends it to how collaboration is sustained in polarized environments and how change is catalyzed in stuck systems.

Empirically, I draw on over five years of ethnographic fieldwork from my Ph.D. focusing on an Israeli environmental peacebuilding organization and 24 partner organizations and initiatives across Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. These settings make visible the mechanisms that operate more quietly in organizations facing polarization elsewhere. My work on sustainability sits inside this program.

At Michigan, I am extending this work to the field level, studying how multistakeholder collaborations are convened in systems where actors do not ordinarily speak to one another, and developing theory on how collaborations persist when partners' affiliations become liabilities in polarized environments.

PhD Committee: Those who sagely reminded me that fieldwork can’t go on forever and a good dissertation is a finished one—Michal Frenkel (Sociology, Chair), Tammar Zilber (Business Administration), and Itay Greenspan (Social Welfare).