Geographical areas of specialization: Mesoamerica, Oaxaca, Mexico.
His interests are at the intersection of political and environmental anthropology.
His dissertation research focuses on the impacts of development policy on rural social organization in Brazil's Amazon estuary region and how small-scale farmers adapt social institutions to manage their relationship to new cycles of state developmentalism. His broader interests center on the ways local forms of social organization articulate with state and non-state institutions to both constrain and enable possibilities for collective action.