My academic work has been grounded in the question of how people come to stand in relation to suffering, power, and possibility (which I sometimes call utopia)—especially when the usual coordinates of identity, empathy, and resistance begin to blur. I trace a throughline in my practice: a commitment to naming the subtleties of power without reducing them, and to exploring how imagination—political, poetic, and ethical—endures within complexity.
Thematically, I work deliberately across a wide range of sources, from ancient Greek texts and their receptions in the Iberian, French, and English early modern worlds to contemporary political theory, critical, anticolonial, and continental philosophy. My work brings together voices that do not immediately belong to one another, allowing proximity, fracture, and unexpected resonance to do their work. This is a form of thinking that stays porous to interruption and committed to a form of address that does not eliminate contradiction. Through this approach, I unsettle the timelines and geographies of the traditional canon of political philosophy, while engaging the theory and poetics of narrative fragments, episodes of militancy, and embodied political practices (acuerpamientos) that make up a broader repertoire of struggle and world-(un)making.
Ph.D. Dissertation “Dreaming Power: ‘Utopian Topoi’ in the Political Thinking of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” (2024).
My doctoral research explored how the body, the kitchen, and the city function as sites of political imagination in the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Rather than treating these spaces as metaphors, I approached them as material and symbolic terrains where colonial and gendered power were both enforced and unsettled. Through close readings of poetic and philosophical texts, I traced how impossible futures are gestured toward—not outside domination, but from within its fractures. The work lives at the intersection of feminist thought, colonial history, and literary form, asking how imagination survives constraint and how thinking can take shape historically, poetically, and politically.
M.A. Thesis “We All Ate Ayotzinapa: The Power and Risks of Identification as a Form of Political Action” (2015).
My MA thesis examined the political, ethical, and affective dynamics of collective identification in the aftermath of state violence. Focusing on the protests following the forced disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, I explored how the slogan “We are all Ayotzinapa” formed a provisional, embodied “we”—not just through solidarity, but through a kind of performative, symbolic consumption. Drawing on bell hooks, phenomenology, and grounded field description, I analyzed how protest can blur the boundaries between empathy and appropriation, grief and desire, risk and nourishment. The work is less a defense or critique than a meditation on the power, texture, and tension of political becoming.