My dissertation research was driven by the question: If and how are USAID food security programs in Guatemala changing in the face of the the 2007/2008 food crisis, climate change induced environmental decline, and staggering malnutrition rates? I write about ‘nutrition-sensitive’ and ‘climate-smart’ agriculture and other recent shifts in development discourse. Ultimately, I found both opportunities and threats posed by a ‘New Green Revolution’ approach to food insecurity.

This research contributed to the articles Feed the Futureland: An actor-based approach to studying food security projects and Food Insecurity in the Northern Triangle: Leveraging Agricultural Policies and Programs for the Benefit of Smallholders.

My work on environmental social movements focuses on how environmental movement frames get constructed in local contexts, as well as the impediments to sustaining multiethnic, multiclass coalitions to achieve transformative change.

I spent time researching and doing filedwork about anti-GMO activism in Guatemala. This research led to articles published in Canadian Food Studies and The Professional Geographer which both foreground the political-economic concerns of Indigenous Guatemalans to genetically modified maize.

In 2023, I began working with a multidisciplinary team at the University of Arizona to study energy transitions in the rural Southwest and the impact of large-scale land change on farmers/ranchers and agricultural communities. This work is funded by the Department of Energy and the US Department of Agriculture.

This work focuses on increasing land-use conflict between solar development and agriculture, in the context of drought and declining water levels in the Colorado River Basin. We are specifically looking at the possibilty of agrivoltaics- the colocation of solar and agriculture as a water conservation strategy and dual-use land strategy that may mitigate some of these tensions and help meet the food, water, and energy needs of disadvantaged rural communities. You can read more about our work here.

Migration has been mostly tangential to my primary research interests, but having worked extensively in Guatemala and the borderlands of the US, it has always been present in the background of my conversations in the field, regardless of the topic.

Having worked in these spaces, I have often been given the opportunity to advocate for rural development policies that are better informed by the needs and realities of rural communities and the demands of food and environmental social movements. I have written about the relationship between food security, drought and rural out-migraiton from Guatemala for the Wilson Center. I have also written about the relationship between environmental conflicts and the repression of environmental movements as a driver of migration.