Welcome!

I am an Assistant Professor at UC Irvine in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society, and Sociology (by courtesy). I am a political sociologist with a focus on science and technology, social movements, collective memory, gender, and human rights. My research agenda is broadly about examining the conditions under which social actors use science to voice their goals and political grievances, and in some instances, resist state power.

My award-winning book, Exhuming Violent Histories: Forensics, Memory, and Rewriting Spain’s Past, (Columbia University Press, 2022), explores how human rights activists use forensic interventions to challenge dominant histories of violence, thereby contesting the state’s claims over historical memory, notably of the highly problematic authoritarian Francoist period. Explicitly, it illustrates that by grounding their claims in science, human rights activists have presented themselves as credible and impartial rather than as partisan and biased activists. In other words, they draw on science, international protocols, and tropes of modernity to depoliticize their account of state terror. Exhuming Violent Histories reveals that human rights activists, using what I call a “depoliticized approach,” can meaningfully change dominant narratives of violence, shape transitional justice efforts, as well as use international advocacy networks and law to achieve their goals and restitute the identities of missing persons. Additionally, I show that this transnational movement’s sovereignty and legitimacy, have risen—in many cases—above that of the nation-state.

My other major research projects continue to examine the intersection, role, and effect of science, social movements, society, and the state. This includes investigating how social movement actors navigate post-authoritarian societies and in the US (specifically in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the current exhumation efforts of victims of the Black Wall Street Massacre) by innovating new forms of justice based in science, technology, and social movement tactics. Additionally, my second book project looks to understand the emergence and governmental uses of technology (i.e. cell phone applications, Internet search histories, facial recognition software, etc.) and the changing legal landscape surrounding reproductive healthcare access, as well as how legal professionals, state legislatures, activists, and regular citizens engage these issues.

I also am a collaborating researcher on Dr. Aaron Panofsky’s (UCLA’s Institute of Society and Genetics) NIH-funded project on white nationalists which seeks to understand how they are reacting to, negotiating, and appropriating genomic science to further their goals.

(Photo by Jose Troconis)