Research Interests
Afro-Latinx Geographies, Black solidarity economies, urban geography, Afro-Latina feminisms, and decolonial methodologies and pedagogical praxis.
Biographical Information
I am an Assistant Professor in Geography and Latinx and Caribbean Studies. I have long been interested in the intersection of class, race, and gender in Latin American societies, particularly in Brazil, and their resulting geographical patterns of racialized uneven economic geographies. I have been organizing with communities of color inside and outside of academia, over the past twenty years and collaborated in a number of popular education projects.
Broadly speaking, my current research engages co-elaborative work with Black women residents in majority-Black geographies in Rio de Janeiro to map Black community economies, and to understand how they conceive of solidarity economics and enact grassroots urban planning and community-driven development initiatives. I am currently working on my book manuscript titled "City of God (desses): Afro-feminist urban marronage in the face of the Racial Capitalism” that centers women-led community economies around struggles for housing and childcare in the favela City of God, Rio de Janeiro.
I was recently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Black and Latinx Studies in the Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies and the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas in Austin (2019-2021). I hold a MA and PhD in Geography from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), a graduate certificate in Peace and Conflict Resolution Studies (Duke University-UNC), and a BA in Sociology of Ethnic Studies from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
