RESEARCH PROJECTS

How archaeology and other disciplines make meaning out of food and foodways in the past.  I am working with co-authors to build theories of the social and political life of food in the past, incorporating intersectionality, slow science, data feminism, and epistemic justice.

Social identities, marginalization, and unfair labor in imperial and colonial encounters. Using archaeological and ethnohistoric methods I study how indigenous peoples in the Andes responded to colonization by creating new strategies for social and economic integration and cooperation. Aquí se puede ver una ponencia en español.

Craft production and wealth goods access across imperial spaces.  With museum collections and excavated collections from the Andean highlands and coast, I analyze the technological style of material culture, especially ceramics, textiles, and metal goods. This work includes both archaeometric techniques and visual analysis of technology. Understanding communities of practice and patterns of access to certain goods informs broader interpretations of how different populations participated in imperial and colonial life in the Andes.

Resettlement and socio-economic reorganization in early Colonial Cusco. Using archival documents and analyzing archaeological settlement patterns, I examine how Indigenous communities in the 16th to 17th centuries reconstituted themselves in light of changing labor demands and land tenure.

Interrogating norms in academic publishing and knowledge production practices. With various colleagues, we are working to ask scholars to reconsider how they think of who is a knowledge producer, what counts as authorship, and to question tendencies toward an audit culture in academia. Rather than attempt to quantify productivity, what if we focused on building relationships and communities and resisted urges to rank each other? 

Defining and re-imagining teaching strategies in anthropology and writing. I research student and instructor experiences in (especially introductory college) courses to understand how ways of knowing and multivocality are centered in content and structure. This research has implications for inclusion and belonging in disciplines and particularly focuses on anti-racist and anti-oppressive pedagogies.