Calla Hummel is a PhD student in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies when and why informal workers organize to lobby the state. More generally, she investigates the conditions under which marginalized people form politically powerful interest groups.

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Calla uses statistical, ethnographic, survey, computational, and formal methods and works with informal workers’ organizations in La Paz, Bolivia and São Paulo, Brazil. Calla started this research as an undergraduate at the University of Washington in Seattle, and continued it at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica in São Paulo, Brazil, before entering UT’s graduate program. Calla’s research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Washington.