Research Interests: Cultural criminology, masculinity, identity, justice studies, intersectional race and gender studies, anthropology of emotions, ethnography of prison, critical social theory
I am a born and raised Tucsonan. I am an alumna of the University of Arizona three times over (BA, MA, PhD) with a doctorate in sociocultural anthropology. I believe my scholarly work and public service are inseparable. I am currently an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Honors College at the University of Arizona. Previously I was an Associate Professor of Anthropology at The University of Memphis. I have an expansive record of community engagement, having served on the Race and Class Equity in the Justice System Taskforce for the organizing coalition MICAH, as a founding board member in support of academic equity with The History Underground., and as board president for the social services agency Old Pueblo Community Services.
My daughter Sybil was born in 2018. She, my husband Gabriel, and I have recently returned to Tucson after nearly 7 years in Memphis, and are relishing the warmth of the desert sun.
I am a born and raised Tucsonan. I am an alumna of the University of Arizona three times over (BA, MA, PhD) with a doctorate in sociocultural anthropology. I believe my scholarly work and public service are inseparable. I am currently an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Honors College at the University of Arizona. Previously I was an Associate Professor of Anthropology at The University of Memphis. I have an expansive record of community engagement, having served on the Race and Class Equity in the Justice System Taskforce for the organizing coalition MICAH, as a founding board member in support of academic equity with The History Underground., and as board president for the social services agency Old Pueblo Community Services.
My daughter Sybil was born in 2018. She, my husband Gabriel, and I have recently returned to Tucson after nearly 7 years in Memphis, and are relishing the warmth of the desert sun.
Academic Trajectory and Praxis
Since 2015, across multiple research, teaching, and community projects, I interrogate the lived experiences and lasting impacts of the American carceral system on the humans within and betwixt its walls. I am interested in understanding how incarcerated individuals creatively express their identities and maintain a sense of selfhood while living under hyper-restrictive conditions, with a particular interest in how men navigate and resist dominant modes of masculine identity in the prison space. I theorize masculinities in the plural, in order to understand the emergent and complex nature of self identity, and to center dignity and possibility of incarcerated peoples in my images, writing, and action.
Current Work: Having shifted into a Professor of Practice role at the University of Arizona, my work will also shift, with a new set of courses, new students, and new possibilities for creative scholarship. I will primarily be teaching courses in the Health and Human Values minor within the U of A Honors College. This minor was developed to allow honors students pursuing the health sciences to draw on the social sciences and humanities to expand their perspectives on health, care, and human life, setting them up for an expansive approach to medical care as they pursue their careers in healthcare. In Fall 2025 I will teach a special topics course for the minor called Gender, Sex, Sexuality and Health. I am currently developing a project on prison hospice care, understanding the experience of dying in the carceral system, and will share more details about this project soon.
Previous Work: My most recent project while at the University of Memphis was in collaboration with colleagues, students, and a local non-profit offering sex-positive, queer-affirming sexual education to folks being released from imprisonment. This project held many aims, from supporting the needs of the organization to a critical reflection on health and care under the current biomedical regime. Past projects include a participatory photovoice project with women who have incarcerated loved ones, as well as a visual ethnography exploring the intersection of racial capitalism and normative masculinity during prison reentry. Across these projects and together with research participants, I attempt to use the camera as a locus of understanding, visually and textually charting the varied experiences and impacts of imprisonment on the self. Beyond these projects that I worked on at the University of Memphis, I am still publicly disseminating my work based on my first ethnographic project, on the experiences of labor for incarcerated wildland firefighters in Arizona. For this project I conducted 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork examining the meanings of skilled labor for incarcerated men. I utilized a multimodal approach, with photography being a central component to my ethnographic technique. I found that participating in this program was an experiential paradox. Incarcerated wildland firefighters are offered little pay for risky work, and have very limited chances of continuing this career on the outside. Yet simultaneously, the daily work of firefighting is very meaningful and in some cases transformative for those who participate. These meaningful experiences allow individuals to participate in dignity-affirming identity work, and thus offers a resistance to the social death of incarceration. One way this occurs is through the expression of inclusive masculinities on the fire crew, which defies the violence of the modern prison experience.
Across my career I have designed and implemented individual ethnographic research projects at the University of Arizona and at the University of Memphis, and I have worked collaboratively within agencies like the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology. I have taught several courses, ranging from a 160-person introductory course on race and the American dream, a 20 person undergraduate/graduate seminar on gender and social identity. In 2019 I became certified as an instructor the Inside Out Prison Education Program, and now I regularly teach an undergraduate anthropology course at the University of Memphis called American Communities alongside incarcerated scholars at the Shelby County Division of Corrections. I plan to teach a course inside of the Federal Correctional Facility in Tucson, AZ, this coming Fall.
Since 2015, across multiple research, teaching, and community projects, I interrogate the lived experiences and lasting impacts of the American carceral system on the humans within and betwixt its walls. I am interested in understanding how incarcerated individuals creatively express their identities and maintain a sense of selfhood while living under hyper-restrictive conditions, with a particular interest in how men navigate and resist dominant modes of masculine identity in the prison space. I theorize masculinities in the plural, in order to understand the emergent and complex nature of self identity, and to center dignity and possibility of incarcerated peoples in my images, writing, and action.
Current Work: Having shifted into a Professor of Practice role at the University of Arizona, my work will also shift, with a new set of courses, new students, and new possibilities for creative scholarship. I will primarily be teaching courses in the Health and Human Values minor within the U of A Honors College. This minor was developed to allow honors students pursuing the health sciences to draw on the social sciences and humanities to expand their perspectives on health, care, and human life, setting them up for an expansive approach to medical care as they pursue their careers in healthcare. In Fall 2025 I will teach a special topics course for the minor called Gender, Sex, Sexuality and Health. I am currently developing a project on prison hospice care, understanding the experience of dying in the carceral system, and will share more details about this project soon.
Previous Work: My most recent project while at the University of Memphis was in collaboration with colleagues, students, and a local non-profit offering sex-positive, queer-affirming sexual education to folks being released from imprisonment. This project held many aims, from supporting the needs of the organization to a critical reflection on health and care under the current biomedical regime. Past projects include a participatory photovoice project with women who have incarcerated loved ones, as well as a visual ethnography exploring the intersection of racial capitalism and normative masculinity during prison reentry. Across these projects and together with research participants, I attempt to use the camera as a locus of understanding, visually and textually charting the varied experiences and impacts of imprisonment on the self. Beyond these projects that I worked on at the University of Memphis, I am still publicly disseminating my work based on my first ethnographic project, on the experiences of labor for incarcerated wildland firefighters in Arizona. For this project I conducted 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork examining the meanings of skilled labor for incarcerated men. I utilized a multimodal approach, with photography being a central component to my ethnographic technique. I found that participating in this program was an experiential paradox. Incarcerated wildland firefighters are offered little pay for risky work, and have very limited chances of continuing this career on the outside. Yet simultaneously, the daily work of firefighting is very meaningful and in some cases transformative for those who participate. These meaningful experiences allow individuals to participate in dignity-affirming identity work, and thus offers a resistance to the social death of incarceration. One way this occurs is through the expression of inclusive masculinities on the fire crew, which defies the violence of the modern prison experience.
Across my career I have designed and implemented individual ethnographic research projects at the University of Arizona and at the University of Memphis, and I have worked collaboratively within agencies like the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology. I have taught several courses, ranging from a 160-person introductory course on race and the American dream, a 20 person undergraduate/graduate seminar on gender and social identity. In 2019 I became certified as an instructor the Inside Out Prison Education Program, and now I regularly teach an undergraduate anthropology course at the University of Memphis called American Communities alongside incarcerated scholars at the Shelby County Division of Corrections. I plan to teach a course inside of the Federal Correctional Facility in Tucson, AZ, this coming Fall.