Welcome to my website. Here you will have access to my papers, newspaper articles and interviews, courses I teach, and projects I am working on.
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 member 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), and 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).
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), a collective project with graduate students. Modeled on Invisible in Austin, we also published Portraits of Latin America: Twelve Stories of Hardship and Hope.
I published The Ambivalent State with Katherine Sobering (Oxford University Press) and with Sofía Servián Squatter Life (Duke University Press). Short advances can be found here and here.
Dark Governance (Chicago University Press) is coming out in 2026. Check it out here https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo281694268.html