Syracuse University, United States
I am a human geographer whose work is driven by a deep commitment to social justice and to transforming the spatial inequalities that shape everyday life.
My research lies at the intersection of urban, population and community geographies, with a focus on the spatial politics of urbanization in the Global South. I examine how urban transformations are constituted through transnational circulations of migrants, capital and ideas, and how these processes generate uneven geographies of accumulation and dispossession.
My work centers on urban change in the Philippines, contributing to theoretical conversations on emergent urban forms, transnational urbanisms, and geographies of displacement and loss. I advocate for decolonial approaches to geography—foregrounding commitments to place, community accountability, and the dismantling of rigid boundaries between academic knowledge production and praxis. I pursue mixed-method research designs, including participatory methodologies, to explore how mapping, storytelling and spatial analysis can become tools for resistance and solidarity.
My theoretical interventions draw from Global South contexts to advance geographic knowledge and interrogate continuing neo-colonial relations. My work has been published in leading journals, including Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Antipode, Urban Studies, Urban Geography, Cities, and Geoforum. My research has been supported by major funding bodies such as the Fulbright Program and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Current projects include collaborative decolonial cartography initiatives with Indigenous communities in the Philippines, the role of New American communities in in U.S. Rust Belt city revitalization, and Native Alaskan–Filipinx solidarities.