I engage in participatory action research with communities investigating the everyday intimate experiences of global urban restructuring, specifically as it concerns gentrification, immigration, and education. I’m interested in creating collective spaces for dialogue, creativity, knowledge production, critical research and action. Before coming to CUNY, I worked as an Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Metropolitan Planning at the University of Utah. In Salt Lake City, I co-directed the Mestizo Arts & Activism Collective (with Matt Bradley and David Quijada), an intergenerational social justice think tank that engages young people as catalysts of change in a model integrating community-based collective research, arts and activism.

My work has been published in journals including Area; Environment & Planning A; City & Society; Gender, Space & Culture; Journal of Youth Studies, and The International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, among others, and edited collections such as the Gentrification Reader, A Companion to Social Geography, and Revolutionizing Education: Youth Participatory Action Research in Motion. One of my great honors was to receive a special recognition award from the ACLU for my work with young people on educational rights. Currently, I am on the editorial boards of Community Development, Children’s Geographies, and Children, Youth, and Environments. I am also on the advisory board of the Public Science Project http://www.publicscienceproject.org and the Centre for Social Justice and Community Action at Durham University, UK.