Research Agenda
My research examines how ethical, sociopolitical, and structural forces shape access to care, health disparities, and professional training in medicine and public health. With a focus on immigrant communities, justice-involved individuals, and those navigating linguistic or legal precarity, I combine ethnographic methods, policy analysis, and community-engaged scholarship to understand and challenge the systems that produce exclusion in healthcare and bioethics.
Methodology and Epistemology: Doing Justice Through Qualitative Research
I approach qualitative methods not only as a means of data collection but as a form of ethical inquiry. My work emphasizes rigor, reflexivity, and transparency—especially in research with structurally vulnerable populations. I develop best practices for collaborative coding, consensus-building, and ethical storytelling in interdisciplinary teams.
My current scholarship explores tensions between activism and ethnographic research, particularly through the concept of productive complicity—the ways researchers both support and complicate the communities they study. This work contributes to broader debates about what ethical, engaged research looks like in an era of widening health and social inequitie
Immigration, Legal Status, and Health Equity
A central strand of my research investigates how legal status functions as a structural determinant of health. Drawing on over five years of ethnographic fieldwork with mixed-status Mexican American communities in Chicago, I argue that undocumented status operates as a master status, shaping experiences of healthcare, education, employment, and belonging.
My book project, Mexican Chicago: Between Belonging and Exclusion, examines how immigrants navigate a city marked by both sanctuary policies and intensified surveillance, revealing how legal status stratifies daily life in both visible and invisible ways.
Building on this foundation, my recent work investigates how healthcare reform, public insurance eligibility, and enrollment processes like the ACA introduce "status-signaling" moments—internal ruptures that complicate family solidarity and community cohesion. I also interrogate how research ethics must evolve to responsibly include undocumented populations, challenging IRB norms that prioritize protection over participation.
Bioethics, Structural Competency, and Health Justice
I argue that bioethics must move beyond individual clinical dilemmas to engage the structural conditions of health injustice. My writing and teaching push the field to take seriously the ethical implications of mass incarceration, structural racism, immigration enforcement, and health system inequities.
I have written extensively on the need for trauma-informed, community-rooted approaches to ethics consultation, particularly in urban safety-net hospitals where histories of disinvestment and medical mistrust persist. My work promotes the integration of frameworks like structural competency, intersectionality, and community-based participatory research into the core of bioethics education and practice.
Carceral Health, Service Learning, and Medical Education
I study the ethical and educational implications of the carceral state for both patients and future healthcare providers. I co-lead a nationally recognized service learning program in partnership with Prison Health News, where medical students respond to health information requests from incarcerated people. This initiative has been featured in BMJ and Medical Education for its dual role as pedagogy and advocacy.
More broadly, I analyze how service learning can disrupt the hidden curriculum in medical education. My recent article in Social Science & Medicine identifies four transformative outcomes—empathy, engagement with injustice, pluralism, and advocacy—and argues for reimagining curricula to treat community expertise as essential to professional formation.