11Rachael Goodman is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Gender and the Economy. Her research focuses on NGO-led development in the Himalayan foothills of India. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in India, she explores how local NGO workers and villagers made development projects work towards local goals and fit with existing social networks without alerting NGO leaders and donors. This research has been published in World Development. At GATE she regularly translates insights from her research in India for practitioners and the general public through international op-eds, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Rachael has developed a new theory of work-life balance addressing the role family members played in enabling women in the Himalayas to balance household and job responsibilities, in order to change the conversation on how to support working women. Rachael continues to engage with anthropologists and policy scholars through working papers on creative uses of development data and the challenges of policy implementation at NGOs. She earned her PhD in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and received her BA in anthropology and international studies at the University of Chicago.
Learn more about Rachael and her research in the video below from our “Meet a Fellow” series!