I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at Macalester College. Drawing on historical, ethnographic, and quantitative methods to better understand how everyday social life is embedded within the global political economy, my research demonstrates how care and punishment are ordered and accomplished within and across the Global North and South.
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 new 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 people as either valuable or disposable? And when states and markets classify and punish people as disposable, how do they forge alternative systems of value and care?
As a historical ethnographer, my research integrates the legacy of colonial world-ordering to intervene in longstanding conversations on the imperial ‘edges’ of state activity, the categorization/evaluation of deviance and social value, the relationship between immigration policy, racialization, and citizenship, and the resistance leveraged by disposed Others in response to state violence. As an instructor, my teaching practice uses history 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.
