I am a social anthropologist researching convergence of non-state governance, armed violence, and extractive economies in Brazil. As part of the INFRACURSIONS project, I am conducting ethnographic research in the Brazilian Amazon (Acre) to understand how drug trafficking intersects with incursion economies (logging and land grabbing). I am particularly interested in what social infrastructures support that convergence and what novel ways of blurring the legal and the illegal might emerge.

This current work builds on extensive long-term ethnographic expertise in urban armed violence and non-state governance in Brazil, specifically in favelas in Greater Rio de Janeiro. My prior project, embedded in a Red Cross programme, examined favela residents’ lived experience of insecurity through the different kinds of social relations that they develop with public service providers, drug gangs, and police.

I am currently finalizing a book manuscript, Managing Shootings: Gangs, Police and Urban Space in Greater Rio de Janeiro, where I argue that people in favelas navigate insecurity through relations of knowing, meaning their sensorial knowledge of the violent urban landscape and their social proximity to gangs and distance from police. Related articles explore the humanitarian tutoring of the state in Brazil on the management of urban armed violence (Humanity Journal) and mockery and laughter as expressions of embodied expertise about gun violence (American Anthropologist).

Prior to joining the University of Bristol, I was Lecturer in Disaster Studies at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI) at the University of Manchester.

I have also previously worked within the humanitarian sector conducting research and other policy work for CARE International and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF/Doctors Without Borders).

From 2023 to 2024, I co-convened the Anthropology of Humanitarianism Network (AHN) of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA).