I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado Denver. My research focuses on poverty, spatial inequality, legal regulation, housing, and the built environment, with a special interest in both forced and voluntary residential mobility. I am a CU Denver Chancellor’s Urban Engaged Scholar, which recognizes “outstanding contributions to the Denver metro region through community-engaged scholarship.”
My book Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans' Tenuous Right to Place won the 2019 Robert Park Award from the American Sociological Association. Manufactured Insecurity examines the social, legal, geospatial, and market forces that intersect to create housing insecurity for an entire class of low-income residents in U.S. mobile home parks. Drawing on ethnographic data collected before, during, and after mobile home park closures and community-wide evictions, the book examines the current state of housing insecurity for mobile home park residents and for all those attempting to hold on to housing they can afford in contemporary urban areas.
Currently, I am working with colleagues on a National Science Foundation-funded study of disaster exposure and recovery in the mobile home park housing stock in Houston following Hurricane Harvey and in Florida following Hurricanes Irma and Micheal.
My secondary project traces the experiences of U.S. residents relocating across state lines for access to cannabis. The project follows those moving for marijuana due to Colorado's cannabis legalization. This project is based on interviews with and ethnography alongside self-termed marijuana "refugees" who move in search of medical treatments, precariously housed "rolling stones" who chose Colorado as a stopping point, and "cannabis capitalists" who move to emerging cannabis markets in search of profit.
My book Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans' Tenuous Right to Place won the 2019 Robert Park Award from the American Sociological Association. Manufactured Insecurity examines the social, legal, geospatial, and market forces that intersect to create housing insecurity for an entire class of low-income residents in U.S. mobile home parks. Drawing on ethnographic data collected before, during, and after mobile home park closures and community-wide evictions, the book examines the current state of housing insecurity for mobile home park residents and for all those attempting to hold on to housing they can afford in contemporary urban areas.
Currently, I am working with colleagues on a National Science Foundation-funded study of disaster exposure and recovery in the mobile home park housing stock in Houston following Hurricane Harvey and in Florida following Hurricanes Irma and Micheal.
My secondary project traces the experiences of U.S. residents relocating across state lines for access to cannabis. The project follows those moving for marijuana due to Colorado's cannabis legalization. This project is based on interviews with and ethnography alongside self-termed marijuana "refugees" who move in search of medical treatments, precariously housed "rolling stones" who chose Colorado as a stopping point, and "cannabis capitalists" who move to emerging cannabis markets in search of profit.