Welcome! I’m an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon and a 2021-2022 Scholar in Residence in the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Policy. I recently published my book A Detroit Story: Urban Decline and the Rise of Property Informality with University of California Press.
My new project When Home is Illegal: How Law and Governance Shape Informal Sheltering redirects the informality lens to understand the rise, conditions, and experiences of unsheltered homelessness in a small west coast city with one of the highest rate of homelessness in the nation.
My recent and new research aligns with my goal of developing the Sociology of Property, and I was recently awarded an Oregon Humanities Center Fellowship to design a course on this topic.
Research Areas:
– housing and homelessness
– race, poverty, and inequality
– informality and resistance
– property and land use
– incarceration and prisoner reentry
