I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Georgia. During the 2020-2021 academic year I was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. (See this short interview.)
Prior to joining UGA, I earned my PhD in Sociology from Brown University where I was an NSF-IGERT Fellow in Development and Inequality in the Global South. My MA is in International Affairs and Development from The New School’s Milano School for International Affairs, Management and Policy and my BA is from Sarah Lawrence College.
I study how policy expertise is deployed and how ideas about ‘poverty’ and ‘social development’ and techniques and tools for managing and measuring these are produced and put to use. My current research examines the role of monitoring and evaluation expertise in the production of democratic accountability in contemporary Mexico.
At UGA I teach Theory, Political Sociology, Introduction to Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and an innovative, experiential learning course: Ethnography and Digital Storytelling for Social Policy. I also often conduct workshops and teach short courses (in academic and non-academic settings) on applied qualitative methods.