Biographical Statement

I am a seasoned academic in the social sciences with more than 35 years of college-level teaching experience. I hold a Master of Arts in Sociology and have completed all doctoral coursework and examinations in Cultural Anthropology (ABD). My academic work centers on social justice, equity, and emancipatory education, with a special focus on the systemic nature of social and cultural oppression and the social production of culture and reality.

Since 2006, I have been a faculty member at Austin Community College in Texas, specializing in courses on social problems, American minorities, and introductory sociology. My educational background includes a Bachelor of Science and Master of Arts in Sociology, as well as an Associate of Arts in Art. I also attended Texas Wesleyan Law School for two years and have taken numerous courses across disciplines and languages to cultivate a broad, interdisciplinary perspective.

In 2023, I completed an externship with the Center for Research on Resilient Cities, Racism, and Equity at the University of Connecticut. I currently conduct independent research through Barefoot Rural Research, which I established in 2024 to support research in rural central Texas and to elevate the experiences of underrepresented communities. In addition to teaching locally, I contribute written work to a variety of local and independent publications.

From 2018 to 2023, I held leadership roles within the Association for Humanist Sociology, serving as Program Chair, President, and Board Member. I worked internationally to recognize and elevate the contributions of scholars from Latin American countries. This work began in 2017 with our first conference in Cuba, designed to highlight Latin contributions to Sociology. I subsequently organized a 2019 bi-national conference in El Paso/Juárez to draw attention to migrant detention during the height of border detentions, and I produced a 2022 conference in Mexico City that brought together participants from across the world and throughout Latin America. These roles reflect my longstanding commitment to humanist approaches to social science, academic collaboration, and global engagement.

Beyond academia, I have spent 40 years involved in community-based work focused on social justice and public service. I served as Director of both the Dallas Peace Center and the Denton Peace Center, coordinating protests and supporting coalition-building across their respective counties. My direct-service work includes serving as a transitional housing counselor for unhoused individuals, a crisis researcher and counselor for FEMA during the 2011 Fort Worth tornado, and Director of a relationship-violence agency providing crisis housing, counseling, and community education in four North Texas counties.

My commitment to social justice began early. As a pregnant teenager and high school dropout in the 1980s without family or institutional support, sociology became essential to my survival and understanding of the world. That experience continues to shape my teaching and research today. At the heart of my work is a dedication to confronting socially constructed suffering and inequality. Through both academic and community-based efforts, I strive to advance equity, raise critical consciousness, and promote emancipatory education as a pathway to meaningful social transformation.

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”
—Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“Those who have the good fortune to be able to devote themselves to scientific pursuits must be the first to place their knowledge at the service of humanity.”
—Karl Marx, quoted by Paul Lafargue (1890/1972)