Benjamin Fields is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research lies at the intersection of urban and economic sociology and African political economy, with a broader interest in how economic actors navigate institutional uncertainty and coordinate activity where formal systems of governance, regulation, and market organization are incomplete, fragmented, or contested.

His dissertation examines real estate development in Cameroon to understand how entrepreneurs, investors, intermediaries, and other market actors coordinate complex urban development projects through combinations of formal institutions and social networks. The project focuses particularly on the roles of trust, risk, informal institutions, and interpersonal relationships in structuring economic action, as well as how actors respond when these arrangements break down. Drawing on qualitative interviews, participant observation, archival research, and spatial analysis, his work treats urban development as both an economic process and a socially organized system of coordination.

Africa serves as the primary empirical setting for his research and as a site for developing broader sociological arguments about markets, institutions, development, and urban transformation. His wider research agenda examines how networks and institutions shape economic organization and development under conditions of political and institutional uncertainty.