
I am a sociologist, ethnographer, photographer, and documentary filmmaker, focused on understanding how political, economic, and environmental transformation connect through people’s lives. My research follows the implementation of Colombia’s landmark peace agreement in the isolated village of Briceño, home to the pilot for a coca substitution program and Colombia’s largest hydroelectric dam. I describe local experiences of a wholesale regional transformation to provide a fresh perspective on longstanding debates related to peace, politics, environmental change, and social deviance: Why do peace processes succeed or fail? What kinds of rural development and statebuilding can bring both social and environmental justice? How can violence and drug economies be overcome? How are peace and state power built in everyday life and local ecologies?
As doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, Guggenheim Emerging Scholar, and Peace Scholar Fellow of the United States Institute of Peace, I am currently writing my dissertation, An Uncomfortable Peace. My work has appeared in Social Problems, Qualitative Sociology, Contexts, Revista Maguaré, El Espectador, the North American Congress on Latin America, Jacobin, and Ethnographic Marginalia, among others.