Welcome
I am an Associate Professor of Sociology and Affiliate Faculty member of the Race, Ethnic, & Gender Studies department at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2013. Formerly, I worked as a Research Sociologist at United States Census Bureau in the Center for Survey Measurement, a qualitative center hosted in the Research & Development directorate.
My research traces how institutions such as medicine, science, the nation-state, and media differentially construct bodies, behaviors, and identities and how actors react to, cope with, or resist these definitions. My first book, The Prescription-to-Prison Pipeline: An Intersectional Analysis of the Medicalization and Criminalization of Pain, with Duke University Press will be published April 2023. This work tells the stories of individuals who have had their lives both medicalized and criminalized in ways that have intensified harms rather than ameliorated them. I am working on a second book on the subject of bio-hacking and body-hacking and how reshaping the human body establishes particular ideals of health, beauty, and a productive society. I have also embarked on a recent project with KC Tenants , a grassroots organization fighting for housing justice to explore how they have reframed housing from a financial commodity to a human right. Across my research and professional experience, I have developed methodological skills in content and discourse analysis, cognitive and semi-structured interviewing, focus groups, survey design, as well as ethnography. I am particularly attentive to issues of power, trust, and inequality, both as research and teaching subjects, but also as something in which I am an active participant. Self-reflexivity is central to my research, teaching, and service.
My research traces how institutions such as medicine, science, the nation-state, and media differentially construct bodies, behaviors, and identities and how actors react to, cope with, or resist these definitions. My first book, The Prescription-to-Prison Pipeline: An Intersectional Analysis of the Medicalization and Criminalization of Pain, with Duke University Press will be published April 2023. This work tells the stories of individuals who have had their lives both medicalized and criminalized in ways that have intensified harms rather than ameliorated them. I am working on a second book on the subject of bio-hacking and body-hacking and how reshaping the human body establishes particular ideals of health, beauty, and a productive society. I have also embarked on a recent project with KC Tenants , a grassroots organization fighting for housing justice to explore how they have reframed housing from a financial commodity to a human right. Across my research and professional experience, I have developed methodological skills in content and discourse analysis, cognitive and semi-structured interviewing, focus groups, survey design, as well as ethnography. I am particularly attentive to issues of power, trust, and inequality, both as research and teaching subjects, but also as something in which I am an active participant. Self-reflexivity is central to my research, teaching, and service.
