My research agenda

My research explores how violence is lived, interpreted, and governed in marginalized urban communities. Too often, violence is studied in narrow ways that privilege public forms of harm over domestic ones and reinforce stigmas about poor, racialized neighborhoods. By centering women’s experiences, I trace how violence moves across private and public spaces and between individual, community, and societal scales.

As a critical criminologist and sociologist, I examine how race, gender, class, and state power shape both the experience of violence and the punitive responses justified in the name of security. My work highlights how structural inequalities are reproduced through everyday harm and institutional practices, while also asking: How do people make sense of violence? How do they resist, heal, or unintentionally reproduce cycles of harm?