My research examines how organizations coordinate, innovate, and adapt when operating at the intersection of multiple fields in politically divided and institutionally constrained contexts. I am particularly interested in how organizations enable cooperation around sustainability and other grand challenges when formal governance mechanisms are weak, contested, or absent.

Empirically, much of my work draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork on environmental peacebuilding initiatives in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. In these extreme, high-stakes settings, often characterized by governmental hostility, societal polarization, and resource asymmetries, I study how organizations develop novel practices, partnerships, and hybrid arrangements to pursue collective goals despite persistent disagreement.

Across this research, I show how organizations navigate competing institutional demands, manage asymmetries of power and capacity, and sustain cooperation over time. I also examine how market-oriented and private-sector practices emerge alongside nonprofit and civil-society efforts, shaping how cooperation is stabilized, scaled, or reconfigured in divided contexts.

My Ph.D. dissertation, written as a collection of articles, focuses on an established Israeli environmental peacebuilding organization and its collaborations with 24 additional Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian organizations and initiatives. Drawing on over five years of fieldwork, the dissertation analyzes organizational dynamics through intersecting ethnonational, gendered, and generational lenses, highlighting both the possibilities and limitations of cross-border environmental cooperation under conditions of deep political constraint.

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).