I am an urban geographer and a Research Fellow in EU's Marie Skłodowska-Curie Program, project title: Weaponizing Social Housing in Rio de Janeiro and Medellín. Until the end of 2023, I am Visiting Scholar in the Weatherhead Scholars Program at Harvard University.

My research focuses on housing and securitization in urban Latin America and beyond. I have studied land conflicts, “pacification”, and protests against involuntary resettlements in Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro. Informed by studies on the performativity of power, I have examined urban informality as a volatile role and ascription in everyday security encounters and in the socio-political and –spatial effects these generate.

From February 2021-January 2024 I will be conducting fieldwork in Latin America and explore emerging forms of governability in the securitized urban peripheries of Medellin and Rio de Janeiro. The retreat of residents to gated enclaves, the formation of right-wing neighborhood defense groups, the employment of surveillance technologies and private security firms, and new strategies to displace low-income populations to the urban peripheries can be studied as global assemblages of securitizing housing.

Secondly, funded by UvA's Centre for Urban Studies, I coordinate the research network ILLICITIES: City-Making and Organized Crime and its blog on the pages of Political and Legal Anthropology (PoLAR), together with Dr. Julienne Weegels (CEDLA).

Thirdly, I am co-PI of the research lab Protein Matters: Securitizing Zoonoses in the EU and the USA which is funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

More information on each project can be found here.