My research examines how violence, policing, and social regulation are experienced, interpreted, and institutionalized across the Americas, with particular attention to how race, gender, class, and state power shape these processes. I conceptualize violence through its horizontal dimensions—how it moves across public and private spaces—and its vertical dimensions—how it operates across individual, community, and societal scales. Centering the experiences of marginalized women, my work draws from sociology, criminology, feminist theory, and Latin American studies to illuminate how structural inequalities are reproduced through everyday harm and institutional practices, particularly in racialized and impoverished communities.

My first book project is a feminist ethnography of women’s everyday experiences with violence in a shantytown in Callao, Peru, an area marked by high homicide rates and its role in the international cocaine trade. The book asks three central questions: How does violence reproduce in marginalized urban neighborhoods? Why do certain ways of experiencing and responding to violence make it so difficult to interrupt, and why do some solutions to violence feel more viable to residents than others? And finally, what becomes visible when we shift the analytical focus to violence and women at the urban margins? Challenging dominant frameworks that emphasize visible, public violence involving men, I instead foreground women’s encounters with violence in the home, community, and with the state. I argue that violence at the urban margins forms a continuous and complex terrain of harm that blurs boundaries between domestic and public life. Women are often tasked with managing insecurity in ways that unintentionally reinforce cycles of harm, while state abandonment and punitive interventions fail to provide real safety. In this context, violence becomes normalized and deeply embedded in everyday life, sustained by structural inequalities, cultural logics, and community dynamics that obscure its roots and complicate its disruption.