Lauren Clingan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at Princeton University. She studies the everyday and unequal consequences of state and market interventions meant to empower women. In the United Arab Emirates, her dissertation examines citizen experiences of state support for women’s employment, tracing, for example, how households define and use women’s wages and how men manage ambivalent emotional reactions to gender change. Work from this research is forthcoming in Social Forces and Social Problems. Another project, in the United States, considers the labor of hegemonic femininity in upscale fitness studios.

Lauren is a recipient of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies’ dissertation writing fellowship. Her research has been supported by several University programs, including the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and the Prize Fellowship in the Social Sciences. She graduated from New York University Abu Dhabi in 2017 with a degree in Social Research and Public Policy and a minor in Economics.