Social media ● gender ● sexuality ● queer studies ● postcolonial theory ● social movements ● queer temporalities ● memory ● the archive ● Chile ● Latin America

Hi there! I’m a recent Anthropology PhD at Rice University. I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Rice’s Program in Writing and Communication, where I teach “Fundamentals of Academic Communication” and “Being the Change: Writing for Activism, Advocacy, and Social Justice.

My dissertation, “The Archive of the Self: Trans Self-Making and Social Media in Santiago de Chile argues that social media constitutes a space for innovation on pre-existing forms of narrative resistance dating back to Chile’s military dictatorship (1973-1990), in which individual and group memory-work became a salient form of resistance. Additionally, I argue that online Chilean trans subjectivities and social media archives are dialectically linked; as my interlocutors discover a broad range of trans subjectivities and experiences, they also alter their subjectivities in relation both to the platform itself and the communities it makes possible.

My work has been published in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, as well as the volume Antropología y archivos en la era digital: usos emergentes de lo audiovisual. vol. 2; Additionally pieces are forthcoming in GLQ and the Routledge Media Anthropology Companion.

I am also passionate about public scholarship, and am engaged in two public-facing initiatives. I am currently a Public Scholarship Intern for the New York Academy of Sciences Anthropology section, where I work to translate anthropological knowledge production for the general public. I am also in the final stages of a collaborative project with several of my main interlocutors and Chilean photographer Karina Fuenzalida, an interactive web portal (de) les Trans, which seeks to question the primacy of the “authoritative gazes of anthropology and photography. This portal will launch in November of 2021. Finally, I am in the process of turning key ideas from my dissertation research into publicly accessible, easily digestible materials available in English and Spanish.