In her scholarship she focuses on how rights categories emerge, evolve and circulate culturally and through law. Her book, Economies of Violence: Transnational Feminism, Postsocialism, and the Politics of Sex Trafficking (Duke University Press, 2015), is a genealogy of global human trafficking discourse in and through the end of the Cold War. The project is tied to transnational feminist studies, postsocialist cultural studies, and critical human rights. She continues to work on critical human rights, including human trafficking, as well as has new projects on human rights in the Anthropocene and theorizing race in and across (post)Soviet coloniality.