I'm a sociologist and educator whose work sits at the intersection of critical pedagogy, participatory research, and visual sociology. I hold a PhD in Education from the San Diego State University and Claremont Graduate University Joint Doctoral Program, a master's in sociology from SDSU, and a bachelor's in history from UCLA. I currently lecture in sociology at San Diego State University, where I also serve as Faculty Advisor for Splice: The Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship. I am the Executive Director and Co-Founder of The Dignified Learning Project, a community organization I co-founded in 2016 when I was in my master's program, and I am the founder of the Praxis in Education Annual Conference, which has continued since I first launched it in 2018 after receiving a grant for its creation.

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My teaching career has stretched across many levels of education, from sixth grade through doctoral seminars, and across institutions including SDSU, UC San Diego, CSU San Marcos, the San Diego Community College District, and secondary schools. In that time, I have taught courses including, but not limited to, introduction to sociology, social problems, qualitative and quantitative research methods, sociology of education, gender and work, popular culture, inequalities, humanities, design thinking, and graduate-level methods of inquiry, among others. Teaching a ninth grader how to think critically and teaching a graduate student how to design participatory research are, to me, about building the conditions for people to understand the world they are already living in, and to see themselves as capable of questioning and reshaping it.

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My research centers on power and resistance through and by knowledge production. Across visual sociology, participatory action research, archival work, and critical and decolonial pedagogies, I aim to understand how communities generate, hold, and reclaim knowledge that dominant institutions and structures typically ignore or appropriate. I believe research should be made with communities, not simply about them, which often takes lived experiences and presents them as "abstract data" instead. 

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Some of my work is written in nontraditional or "unexpected" forms. For example, my forthcoming book chapters, "Fermenting Praxis" and "Pedagogical Potions and Classrooms as Zones of Mysticism," are creative nonfiction, a form I believe belongs far more in the social sciences than it currently does. These chapters explore food, motherhood, and everyday life as sites of resistance and decolonial practice in the academy, and they are among my favorite things I have written. I believe firmly in the ability to merge creative work with empirical research as an epistemological approach, because creative forms can hold ways of knowing that conventional social science methodology too often ignores or pretends are not empirical enough.

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As a 2024-2025 Fulbright U.S. Scholar at the Universidad de Málaga, I conducted research on street art as critical public pedagogy across cities in Andalucía. My broader research focuses on stories that are forgotten or ignored, not presented or explored. For example, I am conducting a study of San Diego's erased housing communities, while another piece examines AI and participatory ethics in higher education, a conceptual framework for intergenerational health and multiethnic identity, and ongoing work on youth participatory action research as both pedagogical and institutional tool.

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Additionally, I am a storyteller in the sense that I write speculative fiction, magical realism, sci-fi, and poetry alongside my academic work, because I have never believed those practices belong in separate rooms. I value creativity and creative endeavors, both in the academic work I do as well as imagining worlds and experiences that represent the lived experience and challenge what we think we know.