My research interests are deeply rooted in my personal and intellectual concerns with political, economic, and socio-spatial processes of marginalization and contestation. My current research projects center around these broad issues through an exploration of how the poor struggle to live and remain in the city despite government practices and policies and economic structures that exclude them from access to formal housing. Employing qualitative and ethnographic methods, I address social dimensions of urban development by examining how struggles for access to housing and to remain in the city are routinely lived and experienced by poor urban populations and the social organizations that represent them. These interests have most recently found intellectual purchase in Latin America and through engagements with Latino immigrant communities in the U.S.
