University of Massachusetts, Boston

Faculty Member, Anthropology

Assistant Professor

About

    I am a cultural anthropologist who specializes in Environmental Anthropology and Political Ecology.  My interests include Ethnoecology, Indigenous Peoples, Globalization, Social and Critical Theory, and Latin America.  My research focuses the ways that people engage, perceive, and create meanings and knowledge about landscapes and the environment and how that engagement is influenced by wider networks of power relations.  Based on field research in Quintana Roo, Mexico, I study of the conflicts over the management of resources on a Biosphere Reserve between the Maasewal Maya, local NGO’s, and the State.  A manuscript detailing this research titled “Entangled Conservation: Coloniality of Nature and Landscape in the Maya Forest” is under review. 
    I have also conducted research on community management of forests and the transformations of forest landscape in Puerto Rico.  The book “La Transformación del Paisaje Puertorriqueño y la Disciplina del Cuerpo Civil de Conservación 1933-1942” (The Transformation of Puerto Rican Landscape and the Discipline of the Civilian Conservation Corps 1933-1942, co-authored with Manuel Valdés-Pizzini and Michael González Cruz) has been published by the University of Puerto Rico (2011).  I teach undergraduate courses in introduction to cultural anthropology, environmental anthropology, globalization, and anthropological theory.

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