My ongoing research foci include the relationship between social position and land use decisions made at the household level, participatory research design, and the shifting economic strategies employed by residents as they negotiate the arrival of tourism in their daily lives. My research began in the Maya village of Ek'Balam, Yucatan in 2004 and since then I have spent more than 24 months in the village conducting ethnographic research. More recently, my interests have shifted to include the role that traditional ecological knowledge plays in community-based tourism development and to explore the potentials for participatory research design and visual documentation in data collection. I received my Ph.D. in anthropology from the University at Albany, SUNY in May 2012, and am currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at California State University, Dominguez Hills.
CSUDH Department of Anthropology
Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology