I am a socio-cultural anthropologist. My research sits at the intersection of political anthropology, human rights, science & technology studies, memory studies, and critical legal studies.
I am currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Not Just Bodies: Memory, Death, and Democracy in Post-Franco Spain. The book is an ethnography of Spain’s historical memory movement, a civil society movement dedicated to locating, exhuming, and honoring the over 130,000 persons disappeared during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and Franco dictatorship (1939-1975). The manuscript looks at how Spanish activists adopt technologies and legal concepts originally developed for state-led democratic transitions in Latin America to critique their own country’s unwillingness to locate the disappeared. In this context, I show how forensic medicine operates as a ritual designed to transform the disappeared into dead citizens, persons who can make legal claims upon the state and ethical claims upon their fellow Spaniards.
