I am comparativist and Latin Americanist, using cutting edge qualitative methods to understand the politics of policymaking and unpopular morality policy change.
I have been awarded a doctorate from the University of Oxford, where I worked under the supervision of Professor Ezequiel Gonzalez-Ocantos.
I am currently working on a book manuscript based on my doctoral dissertation, which examines the variation of recent cannabis policy reforms in Latin America and explains why Uruguay legally regulated cannabis from seed to smoke, Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled in favour of autocultivo and recreational cannabis reform failed in Chile. To answer these questions, I have conducted a comparative analysis of the reform process in Uruguay, Mexico and Chile, using elite interviews, counterfactual analysis and process tracing, based on 13 month of fieldwork and over 150 interviews.
My research interests include drug policy, policy reform, legislative politics, social movements, political and criminal violence, drug trafficking and Latin America. I am particularly interested in the politics of drug policy reform in Latin America and have conducted fieldwork in and published about cannabis reform in Uruguay, Mexico and Chile.
I hold a B.A. in Politics, Psychology and Sociology from the University of Cambridge (2013) and a M.Phil in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford (2015). I was awarded the Crowley Price for my Masters’ dissertation, held an Amelia Jackson Scholarship from Exeter College and my doctoral research was funded by the ESRC.