Global Human Rights Hub fellows
Sarai Richter
Blog posts by Sara (Sarai) Richter
By: Sara (Sarai) Richter
Published:
What if what looks like dysfunction is actually strategy? Drawing from fieldwork in Cambodia, this blog reimagines bureaucracy not as rigid structure, but as a form of performance shaped by survival. It challenges Western assumptions about “proper” governance and highlights how local organizations skillfully navigate global expectations while sustaining relational, community-based practices. This piece offers a fresh lens on development, revealing the hidden intelligence behind what is often misunderstood.
By: Sara (Sarai) Richter
Published:
This reflective, letter-based essay explores the unseen labor, grief, and love that shape feminist scholarship, urging a reimagining of how knowledge is made and who gets credited for it. Through a deeply personal dialogue with another scholar’s work, the author traces the ethical tensions between authorship and relation, highlighting how care, co-mentorship, and embodied witnessing often remain invisible within academic conventions. What emerges is a call to write and research differently—to honor the people who hold our stories, sustain our thinking, and make knowledge possible.
More about Sarai Richter
Sarai Richter is a graduate of the human rights and social justice graduate program at Arizona State University and is currently a PhD student in sociology. Their research, “Khmer Feminist Ecologies: Co-Mentoring More-Than-Human Entanglements,” examines how Khmer feminist NGOs practice co-mentorship as a form of resistance to donor constraints, neoliberal governance, and the nonprofit industrial complex. Drawing on PQI, socially engaged Buddhism, and posthuman-animist feminism, their work theorizes co-mentorship as feminist labor—an entangled, affective, and more-than-human practice of care, refusal, and solidarity that reimagines world-making beyond extractive NGO logics.
They have presented their research at the American Sociological Association, the Pacific Sociological Association, and the International Peace Research Association. Their publication Walking in Relation: A Cross-Cultural Theoretical and Methodological Approach (CEJ) reflects this interdisciplinary approach. They are the student representative for Feminist Development (a subsection of the ASA's Sociology of Development), the co-chair of the Teaching Committee for the Pacific Sociological Association, and a member at large for the Action Research Network of the Americas Conference. Beyond academia, Sarai has extensive experience in refugee resettlement, feminist NGO leadership, and arts-based community practice in Cambodia and the United States.
Fellowship year
2025–26 Cohort
