My research examines how institutions shape inequality, vulnerability, and social harm. Across my work, I ask how legal, political, and administrative systems make some harms visible while rendering others ordinary, legitimate, or difficult to contest.

CURRENT RESEARCH AREAS

• Institutions, Power, and Social Harm
  This area of my work examines how ownership, law, and institutional arrangements structure vulnerability, dependency, exclusion, and domination. I am especially interested in how ordinary legal arrangements can produce social harm while appearing neutral, necessary, or deserved.
• Bureaucracy, Visibility, and Governance
  This research examines how institutions govern through documentation, classification, surveillance, visibility, and organized forms of knowing and not-knowing. Projects in this area include work on bureaucratic (un)knowing, aesthetic governance, punishment, exposure inequality, and state harm.
• Citizenship, Territory, and Political Authority
  This work explores citizenship, borders, territorial partition, and political membership as systems of assigned authority. I examine how jurisdictional boundaries and legal membership become naturalized despite the exclusions and forms of domination they produce.
• Gender-Based Violence and Local Realities
  My research on intimate partner violence examines how survivors, families, communities, and institutions understand and respond to violence. Much of this work draws on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Michoacán, Mexico, and examines the tensions between global intervention frameworks and local realities.
• Qualitative Methods and Research Ethics
  I also write on qualitative methodology, research ethics, and community-engaged research. This work examines relational interviewing, iterative consent, narrative return, researcher responsibility, and the ethical obligations involved in studying violence and vulnerability.
  

SELECTED PROJECTS

• Narratives of Survival: Exploring IPV in Rural Michoacán and the Global Response
  A book project based on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Mexico, examining the disconnect between global intimate partner violence intervention frameworks and local realities.
• Tracking Lethality: Femicide in the United States Database
  A developing data project documenting femicide cases in the United States, with attention to relationship context, prior violence, legal intervention, institutional response, and gaps in public knowledge.
• Victimization, Labor, and Institutional Neglect A project examining the victimization of Latina domestic workers, farmworkers, and other structurally vulnerable workers, with attention to coercion, harassment, labor precarity, and institutional abandonment.

UCI Initiative to End Family Violence Presentation

COMMUNITY-ENGAGED PARTNERSHIPS

My research has involved partnerships and collaborations with organizations including the South Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, Esperanza United, FreeFrom, UN Women Mexico, SEIMUJER Michoacán, Impacta México, Kybernus Michoacán, Latino Health Access, and the Orange County Family Justice Center.

UCI Law & Ethnography Lab

I am also a member of the UCI Law & Ethnography Lab.