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My experience as an ethnographer working outside of the United States has heavily influenced my approach to teaching. In all of my courses I challenge students to think comparatively and at different geographic scales and to consider lived experience and situated logics in explaining and understanding broader social, political, and economic phenomena.

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I am particularly passionate about training students to think about qualitative research from an intersectional and embodied perspective, which I believe prepares them to engage in ethical research, care for themselves throughout the research process, and produce more honest accounts of how scholarly knowledge is produced. My work on sexual harassment and sexualization of field workers has helped me to realize the importance of discussing these experiences and researchers’ embodied experiences more broadly in the classroom. 

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My teaching philosophy and record demonstrate two significant contributions to international education at UF: 1) promoting awareness of and engagement with international scholarship, policies, and activism and 2) preparing students to conduct international research. In courses like Crime and Violence in the Americas, readings and assignments emphasize a plurality of perspectives—including Indigenous, Afro-feminist, and Latinx—so that our diverse student body is reflected in the materials. I also regularly invite guests that exemplify international academic praxis to engage with students in class.

 

The courses I teach in sociology and criminology provide unique opportunities to expose undergraduate and graduate students to international perspectives. My criminological theory graduate seminar provides an excellent example. Criminology is a historically provincial discipline that has long derived knowledge and theory from a small subset of countries. My seminar includes scholarship and policy papers on topics such as crime, violence, and resistance to state repression in the Global South and crimmigration across the Americas. This international approach encourages students to understand theory as the product of a particular time, place, and space and destabilizes problematic assumptions promoted by ethnocentricism.

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I have created multiple spaces at UF where I teach and mentor students outside of the classroom. I currently run two working groups at UF that support students as they write proposals, collect and analyze data, and publish scholarship. I organize The Qualitative Methods Working Group in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law with graduate student Unna Yared. In the Center for Latin American Studies I coordinate the Crime, Law, and Governance Working Group with Dr. Richard Kernaghan.  In 2022, along with Dr. Kernaghan and students from across the university, I organized the annual conference for the Center for Latin American Studies—Ethnographic Horizons of the Americas: Method, Evidence, Aesthetics. The conference provided an opportunity for students to cultivate relationships with nineteen scholars and artists from universities in Canada, the United States, and Latin America who came to UF to lead workshops and participate in conference panels. I am currently director of UF's International Ethnography Lab, which I worked with colleagues and students to open in March 2023.  The lab is a collaborative space that works to foster engagement with ethnographic methods, approaches, and sensibilities across and beyond the university. 

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