My research and teaching goals are centered around the possibilities that analytical examination of taken-for-granted ideas about race, law, and language can inform transformative change. I seek to provide students with an opportunity to consider how current structures for attaining justice, restitution, acknowledgment, and reparations might be re-imagined and re-built. In my mentoring of first-generation undergraduate students for the American Bar Foundation summer research program, I have encouraged students to engage with research questions about law that are also of interest to affected communities. In encouraging students to do research on beliefs about fairness and justice through the law from the perspective of stakeholders, I emphasize that engaged research that centers questions that matter to the participants of the research simultaneously enhance the scope and significance of social science research. 

I have developed an original course on Ethnographic Methods and Community Engaged Research that encourages students to engage in community engaged research that is responsive to the interests of the people who take part in research. In this course, I emphasize that questions that matter to the stakeholders of the research can lead to transformative and expansive findings for social science. 

I am currently developing course syllabi on Law & Society, Latinxs in US Social Institutions, Language & Social Justice, Global Racializations, and Sociology of the Family.