About

I am a sociologist and I study work in Peru and Latin America. I am interested as much in how work is organized as in how those who work organize themselves, or do not.

I started with Peru's mining unions. I wanted to understand what happens to collective action when the space where people live and work changes, for instance when the mining town is replaced by long shifts and travel. That question led me to neighboring ones. I asked who lends resources to workers with less power, how a farmworkers' strike was sustained without unions, and how businesspeople, university rectors and platform companies build labor markets.

In recent years I have worked on Peruvian universities, on app drivers and delivery workers, and on artificial intelligence. I get bored with some topics quickly, though I have obsessions that give me a certain continuity. I distrust single-cause explanations and diagnoses that announce the end of something, whether the union or work itself. I work mostly with interviews and archives, and increasingly with surveys and databases. (Yes, my own work is also being affected by artificial intelligence.)