Hi, I’m Bianca 🙋🏽‍♀️

While studying urban planning, I was often taught about its importance as a technical tool to build and manage cities, but I wished it were taught as a social science. This curiosity led me to development studies, where I found rich theoretical frameworks to understand our world, but these often missed the grounded engagement I was seeking—theory sometimes felt detached from practice. Local governance emerged as a key intersection I was looking for: where the ‘systems world’ of institutions meets the ’life world’ of the people they’re meant to serve. My work explores how local contexts shape relationships between people, places, and institutions.

My most valuable insights come from field research - from listening, observing, and learning from people’s everyday lives. I am drawn to qualitative research frameworks because they honour complexity and context. They allow me to capture what I care about most: experiences, feelings, behaviours, and the meanings people assign to them. I seek to uncover the subtle, often unseen feelings and experiences that shape the larger social-spatial patterns around us.