Research

As an ethnographer and qualitative sociologist, I investigate the racial and cultural politics of immigration in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil and the Southern Cone. My work has examined how asylum policies are made and implemented, racial hierarchies shape those processes, and refugees experience those policies as they navigate them. Particularly, I investigate the racial project of refugee inclusion in Brazil: how forced migrants are racialized by the state and beyond, and with what consequences for what asylum means in practice. Research on race and immigration in Brazil has been predominantly historical, leaving underexamined how immigration and Brazil’s racial order are mutually constituted today. And, though most stories we tell about refugees are North American and European ones, 86 percent of forced migrants are in the Global South.

In new research, I am examining immigration past and present in Latin America’s Southern Cone — Argentina, Chile, Southern Brazil, and Uruguay — to consider questions of nation, identity, and community. I also am conducting a research study on “Cognition and Human Rights” with Monika Krause (LSE, Sociology), where we investigate “human rights” as a cognitive concept: people’s implicit understandings of human rights, human rights violations, and their geographies.

I am invested in ethnographic pedagogy and public sociology, particularly through a collaborative approach. I have co-authored work on teaching ethnography as a theoretical endeavor (Research in Urban Sociology, 2018) and the pedagogical fruit of ethnographic collectives (Teaching Sociology, 2023); participated in two collaborative, public-geared books — Portraits of Persistence: Inequality and Hope in Latin America (UT Press, 2024) and Invisible in Austin: Life and Labor in An American City (UT Press, 2015); and reflected on pursuing public sociology as a localized intervention and collective enterprise (Qualitative Sociology, 2017).

In past work, I’ve examined racial and gendered inequalities in concealed carry applications and denials in the US, and the politics of memory and human rights in Argentina.