I am currently an Assistant Professor affiliated with the Sociology Department and Urban Studies Concentration at Macalester College (Saint Paul, MN).
My recently published work focuses on how global regimes of care organize the labor and movement of people within and across national borders. Currently, in my first book manuscript, Bad Refugees, and my collaborative mixed-methods evaluation work with a transformative justice organization in California prisons, I pursue two lines of questioning: How do states and markets classify refugees and migrants as either valuable or disposable? And when states and markets classify and punish people ‘on the move’ as incarcerable and deportable, how do they forge alternative systems of value and care?
As a historical sociologist, my research integrates the legacy of colonial world-ordering to intervene in longstanding conversations on the imperial ‘edges’ of state activity: the categorization of deviance and social value, the relationship between xenophobia and citizenship, innovations in technologies of surveillance and social control, and resistance mounted by the racially criminalized in response to imperial-state violence. As an instructor, my teaching practice uses archival materials in creative ways to encourage students to think outside the confines of contemporary norms and assumptions.
You can find my solo and collaborative published work in Demography, International Migration Review, International Journal of Sociology, World Development, Population Research and Policy Review, and the anthology, The New Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.