I study how marginalized communities (Black, queer, and disabled) resist and survive systems of inequity like prisons. More broadly, I teach and research race/racism/ethnicity, prisons, abolition, and urban sociology. I received my PhD in Sociology from the University of California—Los Angeles.

My in-progress book manuscript, In/Convenience: Ethnoracism and Discretionary Power in California State Prisons provides an empirical and historical investigation into the use of restricted housing units in California state prisons, linking qualitative literature on race with quantitative literature on prisons to provide an understanding of solitary confinement as institutionalized racism.

A January 2024 version of my CV is available for download here.

Academic Publications

The Need for Interdisciplinary Approaches to Criminal (in)Justice

Symbolic Interaction, 2021

“The authors and editors of [Security and Risk Technologies in Criminal Justice: Critical Perspectives] ask the reader: do our global security and risk technologies do what they claim to do, and if so, at what cost?”

Wayward in Sociology?

Contexts, 2020

"If sociology and individual sociologists are responsible for popularizing the welfare queen and the Moynihan-endorsed dysfunctional Black family among the public sociological imagination, how might we take responsibility and work against such tropes?”

The Road to Private Prison Divestment

Boom: A Journal of California, 2016

"Our Black existence is not disposable, our university degrees do not make us any better than incarcerated individuals, and we are making it plain that all Black Lives Matter."

South African Healthcare: Utopian Dream or Failed Reality? (pdf download)

Mellon Mays Undergraduate Journal, 2016

“The National Health Insurance alone is not enough to fix health disparities in the country if the commodification of healthcare and the alienation of rural and unpaid healthcare workers is not first addressed.”

Public Commentary

What Sociologists Can Tell Us About Americans’ Response to COVID-19

f magazine (interview), 2020

“If we look to past and present examples of mutual aid, we see that there is more than enough to go around as we wait in vain for a more competent and humanistic response from the U.S. government,”

What About Them: Gender-Based Violence and Prison Abolition

Center for the Study of Women, 2019

“Prison abolition through Black feminist analysis, then, does not just address how we can stop the construction of new prisons and jails, but instead begins well before that. The systems that enable gender-based violence are upheld on both sides of the bars, by those inside and outside these institutions.”

Why Black Women Organizers Need to Care for Themselves and Each Other — and How They Can Do It

Scholar Strategy Network, 2018

“To cope with routine problems and extra stressors, the Black women organizers I interviewed used ingenious forms of self-care and collective-care. Lessons from their efforts can inform the efforts of other organizers dealing with similar challenges.”

Who Teaches Academics to Theorize?

Inside Higher Ed, 2018

"In addition to racism, heterosexism, ableism and queer antagonism, we often ignore anyone without an academic credential."

Divestment from private prisons and fossil fuels can work

The Hill, 2016

"Two powerful student movements are joining forces with calls for divestment, focusing on two calamities that threaten their future security: mass incarceration and climate change."

#MasculinitySoFragile: An Essay (pdf)

ASA Sex and Gender Newsletter, November 2015

"When I first started the hashtag #MasculinitySoFragile on Twitter in September, I was not thinking about public sociology. After reading a post from the Twitter user FeministaJones about the violence men inflict on women when their egos are bruised, the tweets flew."