Prior Degrees:

BA in Political Science, Vassar College, 2017.
MSc in Migration, Mobility, and Development, SOAS University, 2021.
MA in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University, 2024.

Areas of Interest/Keywords:

Built environment, feminist STS, urban political ecology, economic and environmental anthropology, labor and migration, Middle East anthropology, literary anthropology

Field Research Plans/ History: 

Bailey Miller's research unfolds at the intersection of environmental anthropology, labor studies, and urbanism in the Middle East. With a lens that merges political economy and political ecology, her work traces the social life of concrete in Beirut, with special attention to Syrian workers on construction sites. She wants to understand how urban destruction's material life informs processes of urban (re)construction, as well as how these processes shape the built environment and broader ecological relations. By focusing on everyday encounters between her interlocutors and built materials, Bailey's work analyzes how concrete's intersection with displaced workers relates to broader patterns of dispossession and the distribution of urban precarity.