Lauren Clingan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at Princeton University. Using life-history interviews and ethnographic methods, she studies the everyday and unequal consequences of state and market interventions meant to empower women. In the United Arab Emirates, her dissertation research reveals the impact of “state-building feminism” on gendered subjectivities, class inequality, family economies, and citizen-state relations. This work challenges Orientalist assumptions while advancing our understanding of gender and labor policy’s intersectional impacts amid neoliberal shifts. Work from this research is forthcoming in Social Forces and Social Problems. A second project, in the United States, analyzes the production and consumption of femininity as embodied cultural capital in the self-care industry and in families.

Lauren’s research has been supported by several University programs, including the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and the Prize Fellowship in the Social Sciences. She graduated from New York University Abu Dhabi in 2017 with a degree in Social Research and Public Policy and a minor in Economics.

Lauren is a dedicated teacher with four years of experience teaching and mentoring undergraduate students at the University of Illinois Chicago, as the instructor of record, and Princeton University and NYU Abu Dhabi, as a teaching assistant and thesis writing advisor.