The Garifuna are a Central American, Afro-Indigenous people whose ethnogenesis emerged on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent in the 17th century as various African groups mixed with Indigenous people on the island. For centuries, the Garifuna have experienced oppression, exile, and continued diaspora that has stretched their communities to Honduras, Belize, and beyond. However, little has been written about the experiences of the Garifuna in Nicaragua, a community of about 5,000 who live primarily on the Caribbean coast of the country.

In Surviving the Americas, Serena Cosgrove, José Idiáquez, Leonard Joseph Bent, and I shed light on what it means to be Garifuna today, particularly in Nicaragua. Our research includes over nine months of fieldwork in Garifuna communities in the Pearl Lagoon on the southern Caribbean coast of Nicaragua and in New York City. The resulting ethnography illustrates the unique social issues of the Nicaraguan Garifuna and how their culture, traditions, and reverence for their ancestors continues to persist.

The book is available through University of Minnesota Press. 

In this innovative volume, scholars, students, and administrators reflect on the liberatory practices undertaken to oppose dual pressures of state repression and neoliberal reform at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) in Nicaragua in the wake of the 2018 civic uprisings in the country.

Through autoethnographic vignettes, each chapter captures the experiences of university leaders, faculty members, and students as they sought to exercise academic freedom under authoritarian attacks. The stories complement analytical rigor to understand the confluence of critical higher education and international solidarity as crucial means of maintaining academic freedom, university autonomy, oppositional knowledge production, and social outreach in higher education globally.

My chapter focuses on the merging of digital and analogue selves to create a new, cyborg ontology that dictates how we understand, analyze, and respond to local crises with global implications. By questioning the scales of "local" and "global" issues as a result of digital tech, the chapter argues that a cyborg understanding of the self informs how we must confront political crises with solidarity, technology, and hope from a new perspective.

The book is available through Routledge.

When we were developing the EXPLORE Toolkit to increase diversity in clinical trials research, we weren't content to assume our work would be accessible to our users. So we conducted qualitative and quantitative assessments of our toolkit with theater testing methods and UX evaluations and gleaned insights from our own interdisciplinary team dynamics through ripple effects mapping. Check out our results in our recently published paper in the Journal of Clinical and Translation Science.