Ms. Whitney Russell is a PhD student in cultural anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, where she researches gender and development. Prior to undertaking a PhD, Ms. Russell completed an MA in sociology at Central European University and a BA in social science at the University of Michigan. She is broadly interested in how foreign development paradigms and interventions operate in the everyday lives of people and communities. She has studied this issue at a birth center in Honduras and with activists in Sweden, and is now turning her attention to what happens after these interventions fail or otherwise cease operations.

Ms. Russell’s research turns a critical eye to the after-lives of failed foreign development in a particular community. She is conducting a collaborative ethnography to better understand how development fails people, perhaps cumulatively, and what that might mean for development practice in the future. She is also interested in the ground-breaking legal changes that will move primary development funding away from foreign donors and toward private Indian companies, seeing this as a unique opportunity to reconsider the challenges of development and everything that is at stake.