Kathleen is entering her second year as an MS/PhD candidate in the department of Development Sociology at Cornell University. She intends to study women’s participation in agricultural labour migration between Latin America and the US and Canada for her PhD dissertation. She hopes to build a career researching gender inequalities in commodity production, and working towards the empowerment of women in agriculture to develop a sustainable global food system.
Prior to her studies at Cornell, Kathleen worked as a researcher in the Sustainable Markets and Responsible Trade program at the International Institute for Sustainable Development. As an IISD associate, she is currently involved in a gender analysis of sustainability standards for developing country commodity production. She has contributed to development projects with Fair Trade coffee producers in Peru through an earlier internship, and has studied the impacts of Fair Trade coffee certification on women and men in Chiapas, Mexico for her MPhil research. Kathleen holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, and a B.A. in Economics from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, where she was born.
