I am an anthropologist and Principal Investigator of the project Changing Environments, Changing Childhoods, on how environmental transitions impact the moral development and well-being of children in three Indigenous communities in Paraguay, Namibia, and Malaysia. For many years I’ve been working with a small Indigenous group of hunter-gatherers, the Aché in eastern Paraguay, on topics such as language shift and endangerment, child socialization, and human–nonhuman relations. In my research I use video to document and analyze everyday interactions, exploring how children become aware of linguistic differences, of the moral norms of their society, and of the physical environments they inhabit. I also incorporate these topics into many of the classes I teach. Learn more about my research and teaching.
I hold a PhD in linguistic anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MA in sociocultural anthropology from the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. I also spent one year at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) in Brazil as the recipient of a DAAD UNIBRAL fellowship. I was a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, a postdoctoral researcher in the Geography of Philosophy Project at UCLA, and a Qualitative Methodologist in Health Science at the US Department of Veterans Affairs.