I am an interdisciplinary youth studies scholar, trained as a sociologist and located in the field of Latin American and Latino Studies.  My research focuses on young people as political subjects and bridges the scholarship on childhood, youth, and girlhood, with research on social movements, activism, and participatory democracy.  Building on my previous research with young activists, I am increasingly focused on these young people’s encounters with adult-run political institutions and the various programs that seek to include them in policy-making.

I am currently working on a new project that looks at the 30-year history of how children’s political participation has been imagined, produced, and institutionalized by international children’s rights organizations.  Based on archival research and interviews, this project considers how “children’s political participation” has developed into an apparatus of global and local governance that ultimately depoliticizes both children and childhood itself.

In addition to my work on children’s rights and participation in international politics, I am also involved in projects in Santa Cruz County that aim to evaluate current practices for youth engagement and to expand young people’s voice, power, and influence in our local political institutions.

Theoretically, my work generally draws from intersectional feminism to illuminate how age functions as an axis of power and inequality in complex relation with other social differences.   I explore how discourses about what it means to be a child, or a youth, or an adult shape the ways people experience and navigate these categories.  Building on the important contributions of Latin American social movements and critical approaches to childhood, my work challenges the naturalization of adults’ power over children and furthers our understanding of how young people can (and should) be included in democratic social and political life.

I have published two books and numerous academic articles on a range of topics related to youth politics and children’s rights, and have written a variety of opinion pieces and essays on young people’s activism.