Hello!  I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at Colgate University, where I teach and do research on social movements and activism, (anti)racism and the body.

I aim to better understand how social movement participants come to see violence and injustice that dominant perspectives occlude while imagining and enacting radical alternatives. The US-based groups I examine contest a range of issues that are global in reach, from militarism and state retrenchment to ecological crisis and racial violence, and do so in creative and often unlikely ways. My scholarship contributes to our understanding of how movement groups enact solidarity across various kinds of social difference and forge cultures of resistance under new global arrangements.

My first book Solidarity in Practice: Moral Protest and the US Security State (Cambridge University Press 2018) examines how justice-seeking solidarity drives activist communities contesting US torture, militarism and immigration policies. This book follows three groups of activists as they engage in unusual and high risk forms of activism such as fasting, pilgrimage, and civil disobedience. It adds to our understanding of solidarity activism under new global arrangements, and illuminates the features of movement activity that deepen activists’ commitment by helping their lives feel more humane, just and meaningful.

Before earning my PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, I spent several years working on immigrant justice issues in New York State, Central Mexico, and Colorado. My writing on these matters has been published in numerous venues, including Mobilization, Race & Class, Interface, and the Denver Post. More recent work is also available in American Quarterly; CITY: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action; and Sociology Compass.