Research Areas

research agenda

I am an interdisciplinary sociologist and scholar-theorist of placemaking whose research cuts across transnational gender, sexuality, culture, race, ethnicity, and urban studies. My ongoing scholarship examines how and why people create, maintain, and give meaning to space in ways that affect who can access material and symbolic resources. In my published work, I use multiple methods to analyze the place and world-making of LGBT+, migrant, and racially marginalized populations across time in diverse physical contexts from a historically Chicano gay bar in L.A. to an elite university in New Jersey, and in virtual contexts from social media to fantastical fiction (Harry Potter). My larger research agenda is to develop a global comparative sociology of placemaking to holistically understand, across scale and context, the process of approaching a foundational aspiration of human activity—forming beloved community.

Throughout my work, I think about place as a spatio-temporal event and placemaking as a spatio-temporal process. Placemaking happens within an ongoing politics of place and power relations that function through categories like race, class, gender, and sexuality in specific geographies. On the micro level, people lay claim to place and space by creating cognitive maps—subjective interpretations of power relations in the world. Rather than assume universal spatial sense, I take subgroup map-making and spatial theorizing seriously. I also open space for individual sense-making and serendipity through my use of oral history interviewing.

In addition to the wealth of feminist interventions, especially Black feminist thought, I pull from timely insights in queer sociological and interdisciplinary methods to study complex groups. In my participant observation, I incorporate insight from the sociology of embodiment and relational ethnography—research on the relationships between various actors and institutions in a field. In other words, I think about people within interlocking systems of oppression where bodies are differently valued, controlled, and negotiated in interaction. I pair this with a case study approach across types of data to attend to what matters to individuals and groups and not just what traditionally matters to sociology. I follow the lead of queer and critical race ethnographers in “studying up, down, and sideways,” knowing that we are never fully in or out of the communities we study and constantly negotiate shifting relationships in the field.

Queer Metropolis: LGBT+ placemaking in Mexico City

Research Overview:

My dissertation-to-book project, Queer Metropolis: LGBT+ Placemaking in Mexico City, investigates the relationship between urban change and LGBT+ placemaking in Mexico City with particular emphasis on how LGBT+ people and organizations have adapted to Covid-19. Specifically, I ask: How do the environmental, economic, and socio-political consequences of disaster shape LGBT+ place projects in this global city? I answer this question using seven months of in-person ethnography and fifteen months of intermittent virtual ethnography, oral history interviews, archival materials, social media content analysis, and an original survey distributed to Mexico City residents in May 2020 to capture early COVID-19 experiences. I further examine how LGBT+ people “queer” Mexico City’s dominant cartographies (ways we map and claim space) by creating their own dynamic city geographies. In doing so, I highlight how gender, desire, and pleasure—as well as conflict and power—shape place and community.

Queer Metropolis engages scholarship in sociology, critical geography, social science on disaster, and urban, gender, and sexuality studies to make several conceptual and methodological contributions. First, I provide an intersectional, multi-scalar/ method analysis of LGBT+ placemaking in a global city with implications that extend beyond Mexico. Placemaking strategies, aesthetics, and politics travel across borders, especially through diasporic communities and tourists who can proliferate new ways of doing and being. Second, I design a creative, interdisciplinary research model that uses diverse methods, sources, and data to contextualize the activity and psyche of a marginalized population turned global social problem. Third, I demonstrate how disasters can foster adaptive innovations. Some organizations I studied, for example, expanded their content and reach through hybrid in-person and digital connections/ offerings. Lastly, I propose concepts and heuristics generalizable beyond the case of Mexico City.

One of my major contributions is a relational theory of action through placemaking I call creative destiny. I define creative destiny as the process of people called by their specific spatial, temporal, and embodied relationships to respond to dynamic needs by creating place. This process is relational in that actors are called to (re)act in relation to specific time, place, and bodies. Creative refers to creating places, businesses, visions, networks, workshops, and other tangible material or symbolic products through these relationships. Destiny encapsulates the observation that much of this placemaking does not result from actors’ pre-established goals, but rather from responsive choices to dynamic needs. My use of destiny is not synonymous with fate; in choosing the word destiny, I evoke a notion of chance as redirected, unexpected possibility. We cannot deny the role of chance in everyday action and in social action. To do so, would be to ignore that innovation comes from making decisions in the face of constraints. Our limitations are precisely the reason for our creativity in that we always work within the realm of the possible to push against it and expand it. I argue that disasters such as COVID-19 are catalysts that shape creative destiny and that groups/ organizations’ creative destiny is broadly caught in a social tension between action around a central figure or vision and action around mutual participation and growth, which leads to diverse place politics and outcomes.

Assessing pandemic effects is also about assessing institutions that structure queer connection, relationship-building, commerce, and world-making. Some local civil society, government, and education groups have measured the impact of COVID-19 on LGBT+ Mexicans in terms of health, violence, and discrimination. My mixed methods approach demonstrates how disaster can not only exacerbate inequality through rupture, but also serve as an opportunity for adaptive innovations. My work demonstrates that collective responsibility during a global pandemic is also about economic justice, social care, collective enjoyment, and emotional and mental accompaniment. Some use the language of decolonization and anti-capitalism to accomplish these goals. Not all LGBT+ placemaking during this time, however, is concerned with disrupting oppressive structures or innovating in the face of disaster; some adaptive efforts are simply about survival and/or about maintaining business as usual as much as possible within a pandemic context.

Selected Fieldwork Images, CDMX

LGBT+ People’s Reported Social and Health Adaptation to COVID-19 in Mexico City

Original survey created on Qualtrics
Online, one-time, self-reported volunteer survey
Snowball sample via individual and LGBT+ organizational networks
Available May 2020
59 questions in Spanish
Variety of question types
Designed for quantitative and qualitative analysis

In this survey project, Ariceli Alfaro and I were particularly interested in the role that communication technology played in LGBT+ residents’ ability to inform themselves about the development of the pandemic as well as the role communication technology and virtual space have played in facilitating LGBT+ people’s social connectivity and health needs. We identify and compare self-reported mental and physical health before and after the start of COVID-19, healthcare strategies, and social connectivity strategies. Unlike “natech events”— earthquakes, oil spills, etc.—with clear and immediate physically destructive effects that the social science of disaster is usually concerned with, COVID-19 is a prolonged, uncertain, and developing disaster with distinct spatial consequences. The destructive potential of COVID-19 is tied both to real-time individual decisions and to social structural contexts. Our preliminary findings point to a spectrum of disaster experiences, competing understandings of quarantine, increased health issues and health concerns, concerns about the economy, and frequent technological connectivity to meet social and health information needs—among others. Subsequent articles and reports will explore these themes drawing from this rich, original data set with an N (total number of participants) of 367.