About me

Trajectory

I am an urban sociologist (with human geographer heart) and critical housing scholar – originally from Puerto Rico – with a longstanding commitment to interdisciplinary research and teaching. My academic background includes a PhD in Urban Sociology and an MSc in Gender and International Development from the London School of Economics (LSE), and a BA in Philosophy and Women’s Studies from Tufts University.

I have taught and supervised students at undergraduate and graduate levels – first as an Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck University’s Department of Psychosocial Studies, and later as an Anniversary Lecturer in Urban Futures at Lancaster University’s Sociology Department. I have also contributed as convener and guest lecturer in sociology, geography and politics departments in the London School of Economics and Queen Mary University.

Currently, I work as a researcher at ICTA-UAB and its Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability. There, I contribute to IMBRACE (Embracing Immigrant Knowledges for Just Climate Health Adaptation), a European Research Council (ERC) and Horizon-funded project examining the intersections between climate change, health, and migration. I am also a Senior Associate Researcher at the University of Bristol’s School for Policy Studies.

In addition to my academic affiliations, I am co-founder and editor of the Radical Housing Journal and a member of the editorial collective of City: Analysis of urban change, theory and action. Since relocating to Barcelona in 2022, I have also worked as a freelance researcher, collaborating with academic institutions and public/private housing organisations.

Before being an academic, I worked in the field of international human/women’s rights in the UK, U.S. and Puerto Rico (with Amnesty International, the Organisation of American States [OAS] and the Ricky Martin Foundation). For a full overview of my work, research and publications, you can download my CV here.

Research

My research explores the home as a site of creation, disruption, and contestation — a space where historical legacies, everyday experiences, and future aspirations converge. I am particularly interested in how housing discourses, practices, and material forms are mobilised during times of crisis and austerity, often in the name of imagined or speculative futures. At the same time, these dynamics can open space for radical individual and collective transformations grounded in hope and resistance.

This work is shaped by critical postcolonial and feminist methodologies, with a focus on the interplay between emotion, affect, and materiality in shaping diverse experiences and imaginaries of urban belonging and futures.

My funded research across Latin America, the Caribbean, South Asia, and Europe focuses on two main areas related to the politics and practices of making and unmaking home:

  • the study of social housing displacements and their relationship to broader urbanisation processes; and

  • the development, governance, and impacts of collaborative housing models.

Across both, my research has foregrounded questions of place, belonging, and the possibilities for alternative urban futures in the face of intersecting housing, health, and environmental crises.

My work on social housing dispossession and activism has resulted in two edited collections (Palgrave, 2016; Wiley 2014). Alongside this, my research on citizen-led alternative housing — particularly cohousing (see recent projects on links with ageing and social care innovations and migration in Europe)—features in an edited collection (Policy Press) published in 2025.

See a full list of publications here.