Greetings and welcome!
I’m a first-generation high school graduate and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington with affiliations in the Law, Societies, and Justice Department, the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, and the Center for Human Rights. I earned my Ph.D. in Sociology at Cornell University in 2019 and my J.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014.
I study how the settler colonial origins of the U.S. continue to shape contemporary social institutions. My work traces this legacy by examining how people and organizations use legal contracts to advance their social position using social status, economic resources, and legal advantages. Much of my research uncovers how these contractual (dis)advantages racialize and marginalize social groups within 1) the civil and criminal legal system, 2) the child welfare system, and 3) tribal-federal government relations. As a publicly engaged scholar, my work is driven by meaningful and reciprocal community partnerships that prioritize the needs of everyday people. To this end, I’m committed to translating social scientific findings into policy interventions that challenge the systemic inequalities my work uncovers. The research belongs to those who live it.
In one thread of my research, I study urban policing at the intersection of race, class, and labor to examine the interconnected role that police unions, mayors, and city councils can play in preventing police accountability. This organizational field framework breaks away from tropes about police as crime fighters to focus on what police are – municipal employees with salaries and benefits fully funded by city residents and thus subject to their demands. Throughout, I emphasize the political economy that underwrites police violence and its potential to reimagine the future of U.S. policing through changes in employment, including movements to defund and abolish the police. My ongoing policing research examines national police union organizations and their implications for the study of organizations, work, and social movements.
My second research thread extends my empirical contributions in race, law, and organizations to address the intersection of tribal sovereignty and state violence. In one set of papers, I find that the relationship between Native family separation and efforts to erode tribal sovereignty devastates the social, political, and legal status of Native children. In a second set of paper, I find that the othering processes that tribal nations experience with civil legal systems are also used to destabilize Native families in U.S. courts, refuse Native advancement in higher education, and limit tribal business partnerships. The next stage of this multi-method research investigates how settler colonialism continues to impact Native exposure to the criminal legal system.
My published work can be found in high-impact interdisciplinary journals, including Criminology, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, the Columbia Journal of Race and Law, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal. Additionally, my work has been recognized with generous funding from the Ford Foundation (2023-2024), the William T. Grant Foundation (2021-2024), and the Spencer Foundation (2021-2022). I’ve also been honored with the Law and Society Association’s John Hope Franklin Article Prize (2022) and the American Sociological Association’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Distinguished Early Career Award (2022).