Before coming to the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge as a PhD student, I completed an MSc in Social and Cultural Anthropology (University College London) and a BA in Sociology (P. Universidad Católica de Chile).  I also worked in Chile as a research assistant at the P. Universidad Católica, and a policy consultant in projects for UNESCO and the Chilean government.

For my doctoral thesis, I conducted 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Santiago, the capital of Chile, with Haitian women, and their everyday encounters with state agents and Chilean employers.  I looked at how migrant women’s efforts to live and work in a new country reconfigured political and economic institutions underpinned by postcolonial hierarchies and neoliberal power dynamics. 

I am interested in exploring how experiences of difference bring to the fore novel ways of understanding the processes and relations that constitute states and markets, and how economic and political imaginaries are constructed in and through intimate subjectivities and encounters. I focus on the intersections between the anthropology of gender and racism and its convergence with anthropological debates about state-formation and economic practices in postcolonial contexts. I am also interested in the way historical legacies of racial and gender hierarchies in Latin America configure senses of belonging among mobile and displaced populations within the region.