Her research agenda has grown out of an enduring interest in the emotional lives of adults and children in early childhood classrooms using collaborative ethnographic research methods and micro-level discourse analysis. She has developed two primary lines of research: (a) examining preschool children’s gendered emotional themes and peer culture play, and (b) examining emotional dimensions of early childhood teachers’ classroom practices in the United States and Nepal. A central theme in her research has been to challenge and deconstruct normative ways of thinking about and being with children, families and teachers in diverse social and cultural contexts.