About Me

I'm a storyteller and scholar whose work sits at the intersection of participatory research, community engagement, ancestral memory, 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 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.

My teaching career has stretched across many levels of education, from sixth grade through doctoral seminars, which has provided me with unique and valuable insight into the institution of education as a whole. For me, teaching a ninth grader how to think critically and teaching a graduate student how to design participatory research are 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.

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.

Some of my work is written in nontraditional or "unexpected" forms. For example, my book chapters, "Fermenting Praxis" and "Pedagogical Potions and Classrooms as Zones of Mysticism," are creative nonfiction, a form I believe belongs far more in academic research 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.

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, work that started simply because I walked by the walls daily in our neighborhood. My broader research keeps circling back to stories that are forgotten or ignored, not presented or explored, which is probably the same instinct that shows up when I'm writing fiction instead of an article. Right now that means a study of San Diego's erased housing communities, a conceptual framework for intergenerational health and multiethnic identity, and ongoing work on youth participatory action research as both a pedagogical and institutional tool.

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 as separate from my identity as a scholar. 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.

And, being a mom has shaped the way I see the world as much as any degree or research project has. My kids bring me hope and joy, and on the harder days, they're what keep pushing me toward resistance rather than away from it. While it is perhaps the last on this list in my about me, it is the most rewarding, as cliché as that is, yet sharing road trips and books, discussing their homework and memories, are the best moments of my life.