Alisson Rowland is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at University of California, Irvine. Her fields of study are International Relations and International Political Economy, and she engages with decolonial, critical, and feminist epistemologies. Her most recent project revolves around constitutive phenomena of gendered and informalized labor, and how they complicate governance and social welfare outcomes. She focuses on global value chains as a form of hyper-globalized production, and argues these social structures exert power over global to local contexts. Articulations of worker’s social protections should be fundamentally rooted in how work is valued, through gendered constructions and increasing demands for flexible labor. Part of a larger project, she plans to use these theoretical underpinnings as the basis for her dissertation. Outside of research, she loves to hike in sunny California and play board games with her peers.