Lauren Clingan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at Princeton University. She studies how cultural processes and relational work may reproduce gender and intersecting inequalities, often through obfuscatory practices. Her research to-date has focused on how Emirati citizens experience the UAE state’s promotion of women’s employment, using qualitative interviews to understand what cultural and relational mechanisms shape the intimate impacts of state feminism—tracing, for example, how men manage their ambivalent emotional reactions and how households define and use women’s wages. Another ethnographic project, in the United States, considers how boutique fitness offers a classed solution to gendered problems. Her research interests include gender, economic and cultural sociology, public policy, global and transnational sociology, consumption, and embodiment.

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.