I’m a social anthropologist and medical, environmental, labor, and critical security studies researcher. I’m also a tenure-track assistant professor of anthropology and interdisciplinary studies at Miami Dade College and research faculty in internal medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine.

My writing elucidates how ideology and institutions figure the work people do, care we give and receive, and ways people and communities advocate for change. I have written about how drug users are fighting to save one another's lives and end the War on Drugs, making life-saving care into thriving politics; the false promises of for-profit federal consent decree police reforms and the case for grassroots politics, not technocrat contractors, being our best chance to reduce police violence and end carceral governance; how ‘informal’ miners in Southern Africa are criminalized by misguided efforts that pose policing and state and corporate violence as solutions to traumas miners and mining communities endure, not the sources of violence, illness, and injuries in and around mines; and why migrant rights organizations and movements should help migrants access land and the city, not just secure their rights to live in state territory, because, to many migrants, the “right to the city” and to acesss land to live or work, and immigrant rights, are the same.

My work’s been cited in academic research and in popular publications such as The Nation. And I’ve been interviewed-mostly about police reform and harm reduction-by The New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, NPR, CNN, Boston Weekly, Sacramento Bee, Kentucky Center for Investigative Journalism & WDRB TV.

I lead a federal grant-funded lab focusing on medical, psychological, and environmental anthropology and critical security studies. My lab train cohorts of 8 paid student researchers. I also teach introductory and cultural anthropology, science fiction anthropology, medical and psychological anthropology, and an interdisciplinary class on science and/in culture.

Contact me here or via social media. My latest writings are posted to Academia.edu and ResearchGate.