My anthropological scholarship explores the forms of knowledge production and circulation that emerge in contexts of generalized violence and opacity.
It analyzes the psychosocial and performative effects of this knowledge, as well as how it constitutes and unmakes political authority. My first book project, Mediations of War: Statehood, Criminality, and the Politics of Knowledge in Mexico investigates the connections between violence and language amid Mexico’s “war on drug trafficking” by analyzing the oblique ways in which Mexicans engage with the war, such as through conspiracy theory, rumor, fiction, and spectacle. My second book project, Femininity and the Drug War: The Wounded Body and the Politics of Visibility in Mexico, explores the multiple practices through which Mexican feminists resignify gender-based violence and femininity as part of their struggle for justice.
I am Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester.
