I am the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long professor in Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas-Austin. My main areas of research, writing and teaching are urban politics and marginality and ethnographic methods. I am a founding director of the Urban Ethnography Lab at UT-Austin.
I am the author of Poor People’s Politics (Duke University Press, 2000), Contentious Lives (Duke University Press, 2003), Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Patients of the State (Duke University Press, 2012), Flammable. Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown (co-authored with Débora Swistun, Oxford University Press, 2009), In Harm’s Way. The Uses and Forms of Interpersonal Violence at the Urban Margins (co-authored with María Fernanda Berti, Princeton University Press, 2015), The Ambivalent State (co-authored with Katherine Sobering, Oxford University Press, 2019).
Together with anthropologists Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, I am the editor of Violence at the Urban Margins (Oxford University Press, 2015). I am also the editor of Invisible in Austin (University of Texas Press, 2015) and Portraits of Persistence (University of Texas Press, 2024), two collective projects with current and former graduate students from the Urban Ethnography Lab.
My last book, co-authored with Sofía Servián, is called Squatter Life. Persistence at the Urban Margins of Buenos Aires and was recently published by Duke University Press.