Research

As an ethnographer and qualitative sociologist, I investigate race/ethnicity and immigration in Brazil and Latin America’s 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 have investigated 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.

In new research, I examine 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 am also conducting a research study “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 why sociology needs ethnography (Qualitative Sociology, 2026), 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.