I first developed interest in conducting research during my time at the Third World Studies Center of the University of the Philippines-Diliman. From 2001-2008, I studied the political economy of negotiations in the World Trade Organization, mobilizations in Southeast Asia against free trade, Philippine civil society discourse on globalization, and North-South divide in the campaign against land mines and illicit small arms trade. In these projects, I conducted data-gathering fieldwork in Cambodia, Thailand, and Kenya. I also have a rich experience in cross-national collaborative research, as I was part of a five-country team of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development Research on Global Civil Society Movements: Dynamics in International Campaigns and National Implementation. My research on these topics has been published in Asian Survey and in the edited volume, Localizing and Transnationalizing Contentious Politics: Global Civil Society Movements in the Philippines.

At Pitt, I also conducted participant-observation of  the protests against the 2009 G20 Summit in Pittsburgh. I collaborated with Jane Walsh of Clarion University of Pennsylvania in writing a paper on the dynamics of local-global movement framing. I also worked as a graduate student researcher for Melanie Hughes on her project on women’s international nongovernmental organizations (WINGOs), funded by the National Science Foundation. In this project, they built a dataset of WINGOs from 1950-2013 based on the Yearbook of International Organizations. This dataset is available at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research.