Current Research
My doctoral research at the University of Toronto looks to explore and map the embodied religious responses of rural Andean communities towards a variety of environmental hazards in the Colca Canyon (Arequipa, Peru). As a region characterized by high-altitude agricultural, infrastructural, and water management challenges amid other forms of environmental uncertainty, there are a variety of fascinating ways in which lived religion and embodiment shape (and are shaped by) the changing environment. My research on these themes ask the following core question: How do rural communities in this region produce and negotiate religious worlds through bodily practice, storytelling, ritual, and the formation of emotional relationships with the ever-changing environment?
Research Themes
Interdisciplinary approaches.
How might the anthropology of religion and cultural geography come together to help describe regional religious complexities?
Environmental change.
In what ways do environmental hazards create precarity, change rural lifeways, and challenge pathways to community resilience?
Rural spaces, rural religion.
How is material religion, symbology, and religious ritual practiced and expressed in distinctly rural contexts across Peru?
Embodiment in a world of change.
Which ecological Andean practices are expressed through bodily relationships to the natural world? How may these shift in response to environmental change?
Evangélicos and other distinct religious groups.
In what ways are distinct religious groups (such as Peruvian Evangelicals) influencing the social fabrics and religious landscapes of rural communities?
Meaning-making.
How do individuals reason with environmental change and create meaning from it? In what ways might people form new environmental worldviews?
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