Olá!
 
I’m a sociologist, writer, educator, and recovering journalist. I study how people make sense of violence, crime, and justice—and how institutions rewrite, flatten, or amplify those stories.
 
I hold a PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto and am now an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, where I teach and write about the narrative life of crime and violence across the globe. In the classroom, I explore how stories shape social worlds in courses like Criminal Behavior and Social Control, Prisons Around the World, and Girlhood, Interrupted: The Criminalization of Girls.​
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My work follows girls and women whose lives intersect with the drug economy and the criminal legal system in Brazil and the United States. Drawing on interviews, media accounts, court files, and institutional archives, I trace how global markets, local histories, and intimate forms of harm braid themselves into people's lives and the stories they tell.
 
My research has appeared in The British Journal of Criminology, Women & Criminal Justice, and Cultural Sociology.
 
My current book project returns to my hometown, Porto Alegre, to follow teenage girls working at the bottom of the cocaine economy. Based on nearly a decade of interviews with incarcerated girls and judicial records, the project examines how precarity, violence, and the transnational drug trade press into everyday life, and how young people craft meaning, explanation, and hope in the midst of it.