I am a Global Justice postdoctoral scholar at University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies. I completed my Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley School of Education in 2023, with a designated emphasis in Gender & Women’s Studies. Grounded in sociological theories and methods, I am an ethnographer and study education and social movements including youth political and civic engagement; sociocultural approaches to language, literacies, and learning across in-person and digital spaces; and interconnections between local and global structures of oppression and resistance. Throughout my research and teaching, I take critical approaches to understanding gender, race, and class. My work is driven by commitments to social justice, community engagement, and the transformative and humanizing possibilities of education in and especially outside of schools. It has been published in several peer-reviewed journals including Ethnography & Education and with co-authors in Comparative Education Review, as well as in public scholarship.

My work has been motivated by understanding how young people come together to envision and enact social change, and the kinds of relationships among social movements across geographic space and time. My dissertation examined the unprecedented rise of youth movements in Brazil and was supported by grants and fellowships including the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) award. It focused on how youth interconnect, or articulate, plural struggles in movements for a society that is anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist, and promotes LGBTQI rights and climate justice. I found that in doing so, youth are also (re)creating forms of collective action, education in multimodal and hybrid spaces, and democracy amidst a polarized society.

Born in Thailand, I lived in Brazil for seven years (I’m originally from the U.S.) and lived and worked in the U.S., Latin America, and Africa. Since I was a middle schooler, I’ve spent most of my time in Latin America and the U.S., so I speak Portuguese and Spanish. I love collaborating to design qualitative research, especially with youth, teaching it, and figuring out ways it can be meaningful. Since 2002 I have co-led research projects about inequalities and resistance related to education, gender, and (non-)violence. I focused on addressing disparities in education and health; interconnections between gender-based violence and urban violence; marriage during childhood and adolescence; and how violence early in life, especially non-physical forms of violence, can shape youth and adult experiences.

While at UC Berkeley, I was a graduate affiliate of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS). At University of Denver, I am engaged in writing projects, supporting the development of a Global Justice certificate, and teaching a course on Global Justice which focuses on social movements.