I've always been curious about the distance between who we are and who we're expected to be. The things we learn to hide. The language we borrow to make ourselves understood. The labels that open doors, only to become another set of walls. Research gives me somewhere to take these questions. Not necessarily to settle them. Sometimes the more interesting finding is that we've been asking the wrong question altogether. I'm currently pursuing a PhD in Social Welfare at the CUNY Graduate Center, where my work brings together queer theory, psychotherapy, and social welfare research. What interests me most is how power enters ordinary life. Through a diagnosis. A clinical encounter. A question on a form. And how institutions that promise care can also determine whose experiences count, whose needs are recognized, and whose lives remain difficult to accommodate.

Queer communities, alcohol use, and the possibilities of harm reduction

Research collaboration with Dr. Lauren Bochicchio & colleagues | College of Staten Island, CUNY

What happens when the places where we find belonging are also places where drinking is expected? Queer social spaces have long offered something that wasn't always available elsewhere: recognition. Community. Somewhere to exhale. But belonging can come with expectations of its own. Working with Dr. Lauren Bochicchio, I'm contributing to research examining alcohol use and harm reduction among sexual minority women, including the development of an intervention. The work asks how interventions can respond to the realities of queer lives rather than treating alcohol use as a behavior detached from the circumstances in which it occurs. Alongside the intervention protocol, our work draws on expert perspectives to consider what makes support relevant and responsive to the communities it intends to serve. I'm particularly interested in the tension between individual behavior change and the social environments in which that behavior takes shape.Because asking someone to drink less is one thing. Asking what drinking makes possible, and what alternatives are available, is another.

Research ongoing. Manuscripts in preparation.

Collaborative research with Kelsey G. Reeder and colleagues | Manuscripts in preparation

Can research claim to challenge oppression while leaving its own ways of producing knowledge untouched? Social work research has a long history of studying people who are marginalized. But who gets to formulate the questions? Who decides what constitutes evidence? And what happens to the knowledge participants bring once the interviews are over? I'm contributing to two collaborative manuscripts that approach these questions from queer and trans perspectives.

Queering and Transing Social Work Research: A Co-Conspirator Epistemology
 

This paper considers what it might mean for researchers to move beyond the familiar position of detached observer. Rather than treating neutrality as an unquestioned virtue, the work explores research as a practice shaped by relationships, political commitments, and responsibility to the people whose lives become its subject.

From Extraction to Liberation: Methodological Shifts for Queering and Transing Social Work Research
 

The companion manuscript turns toward methodology itself. What would research look like if queer and trans communities were not simply sources of information, but participants in determining what knowledge matters and what it should make possible? The paper explores possibilities for research practices that resist extraction and take seriously the histories of exclusion embedded within academic knowledge production. Neither manuscript offers an excuse to abandon rigor. Quite the opposite. They ask us to examine what rigor has been taken to mean, and whom its conventions have historically served.Both manuscripts are collaborative works in preparation.

Before the PhD, there were two dissertations. Different methods. Different stages of my life.
And, looking back, a rather persistent preoccupation with the ways we learn to see ourselves through other people's eyes.

Un-Closeting Gay Shame | BSc Counseling dissertation | University of East London, 2023 | Distinction

What happens when shame enters the therapy room, but nobody calls it by its name? Shame doesn't always announce itself. Sometimes it hides behind perfectionism. A reluctance to be seen. An almost compulsive need to prove that one is worthy of love. For my undergraduate dissertation, I interviewed eight LGBTQIA+ counselors about their experiences of working with gay shame. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis, I explored how shame manifests in therapy, how cultural experiences shape the therapeutic relationship, and what counselors themselves bring into the encounter. One finding stayed with me: the importance of the relationship itself. Techniques have their place. But what happens when a therapist can recognize shame without reproducing it? When the person sitting opposite you is willing to question the very assumptions that helped shame take root? The study also complicated the familiar journey from shame to pride. Must pride always be the destination? What room is left for those who don't experience their identities in such straightforward terms? It was my first substantial research project. It also helped shape the kind of therapist I wanted to become.