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I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of the Fraser Valley.
I earned my Ph.D. in Government (comparative politics and public law) from the University of Texas at Austin. I also hold a M.A. in Political Science and an A.B. in International Affairs from the University of Georgia.
I specialize in comparative politics and Latin American politics. My research focuses on Indigenous mobilization in Mexico.
My book manuscript, We Will Not Be Quiet: Clientelism, Keystone Organizations, and the Dynamics of Protest in Indigenous Southern Mexico, analyzes why the residents of different counties of southern Mexico vary in their use of protest.
It relies on an original dataset of 1,290 protest events in the Mexican states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Yucatan that occurred during the 2000 to 2012 federal election seasons that I coded from local newspaper reports. It also draws on my field research in southern Mexico, including interviews with Indigenous activists.
I show how clientelism undermines the formation of local protest networks, and how what I call “keystone organizations,” or organizations that have a disproportionate effect on the political environment relative to their actual abundance, facilitate protest.
My article, Keystone Organizations Versus Clientelism: Understanding Protest Frequency in Indigenous Southern Mexico" on this topic appears in the April 2019 issue of Comparative Politics.