My scholarly work examines how people create meaning through everyday interactions with material culture, and how those meaning-making practices shape economic, social, and urban life. As a sociological view of mundane life demands reflexivity, requiring both familiarity and estrangement, my work exists in the tensions between the micro and macro in social life. To mirror this sociological imagination, I integrate both close readings of culture, from hermeneutics to ethnography and visual sociology, with broader analyses using computational methods and GIS spatial analysis. Across my writing and teaching, I aim to practice this reflexivity in creating explanatory frameworks grounded in interdisciplinary discourse and ethnographic practice. 

I am a sociologist with academic training in cultural sociology with specialization in economic sociology, urban studies, material culture, fashion studies, and public and digital humanities. My research is broadly concerned with how meaning-making in culture produces structural effects in society. I have examined how fashion operates as a strategic resource in social movements under authoritarian regimes; how cultural performance can create frameworks for negotiating stigma; how meaning is produced through material culture in secondhand fashion; and how thrifting consumption reshapes urban space and contributes to inequality and gentrification in New York City. 

In addition to my academic work, I bring a background in design and applied research to my role as a strategy consultant. I have led and contributed to projects for Fortune 100 companies and public sector organizations, including Meta, Yves Saint Laurent, and L’Oréal. My consulting work spans cultural insight, communications strategy, and public innovation for organizations working at the intersection of philanthropy, public service, and civil society such as the California Volunteers and the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, the California Department of Health Care Access and Information (HCAI), and the Davis-Tennon Foundation. In these roles, I apply sociological frameworks to help organizations navigate complex cultural dynamics, design more equitable systems, and translate research into real-world impact. 

Currently I am an adjunct professor in the Media, Culture, and Communication Department at New York University (NYU), where I teach courses on the business of fashion. I am also on leave from Matter Studios, a design-research firm I co-founded to complete my book on secondhand fashion and urban transformation in New York City. Previously, I taught in the Public Humanities Program at Yale University, where I designed and led seminars on public humanities and civic imagination, and in the Social Sciences Department at The Fashion Institute of Technology, offering courses on fashion, culture, and society.