I am an Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. My teaching and research focus on postcolonial and feminist studies of science and technology, with an emphasis on Brazil and its transnational connections.

My first book — Improvised Tech: Tactics in an Unequal World, under advance contract with Stanford University Press — examines technological improvisation as a situated and politically ambivalent tactic for navigating inequality. Drawing on long-term fieldwork across community technology projects, cellphone repair schools, electronics factories, and activist networks, the book asks what happens when “making do” is reframed as innovation. Rather than treating improvisation as inherently subversive or liberatory, I show how its value depends on the people and institutions involved, the material conditions in which it takes place, and the circuits through which it is celebrated, captured, or condemned.

My work has appeared in a range of venues, including Configurations (“Improvisation from the South”), American Anthropologist (“A Fablab at the Periphery”), Third World Quarterly (“Becoming a Repair Entrepreneur”), and Kits for Digital Methods (“The Making Together Kit”). This scholarship has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.