I have grappled with a perpetual wanderlust since childhood—not just a desire to travel, but a deep, restless urge to see and experience the world differently, to understand it beyond the limits of what I had been told or seen so far. Though I hadn’t really traveled until I was about eleven, I knew I needed to move, experience, and learn beyond what was familiar to me. It was in eighth grade, on my first flight to New York, traveling through Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. in May 2002, that I felt it in my core: I needed to think through  places, stories, and ways of knowing.

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I have also always loved photography and storytelling, long before I had the language to describe why. In elementary school, I won first place in a San Diego program called Reflections for a photograph I had taken, advancing to the district level. In middle school, I filled journals—one adorned with Van Gogh’s The Café Terrace—with poetry about pain and anguish, joy and wonder, love and longing. I wrote because I had to. I told stories because they shaped the way I understood the world.

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Somehow, and perhaps inevitably, I ended up in research—a natural extension of my storytelling and questioning. Through a master’s in sociology and a PhD in education, I didn’t just study the world; I interrogated the ways we come to know it. I became a research methodologist, exploring knowledge production, epistemic boundaries, and who is included—or excluded—from meaning-making. Along the way, I founded a nonprofit, The Dignified Learning Project, lectured in sociology and education, and taught humanities at the height of COVID school closures—an experience that fundamentally reshaped how I see education and knowledge itself.

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At my core, I am a writer. My dream is to write books—magical realism, speculative fiction, sci-fi, poetry, nonfiction—stories that bend reality and invite us to imagine otherwise. In my research, I strive to tell stories that challenge dominant narratives, centering lived experiences as vital sources of knowledge. My work explores the boundaries of knowledge—how they are constructed, contested, the power that defines what is appropriate or legitimate, and reimagined within the education system—through visual methodologies, creative endeavors, and critical inquiry. I believe that research is not just about inquiry; it is about action, about resisting the status quo, and questioning traditional ideas of knowledge production. 

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I also believe in a humanizing pedagogy—that we are whole people, not just academics, students, or workers. Knowledge is not just in books and institutions but in our stories, our experiences, and our communities. This website reflects that philosophy. You will find not only my research, teaching, and academic work here but also my artistic self—the traveler, the photographer, the writer of fiction and poetry, and the thinker who stitches together wanderlust with the inquiry.

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Because to me, wanderlust is not just about movement—it is about crossing and re-crossing the borders of identity, culture, and knowledge. It is about questioning, unlearning, and reimagining. It is about storytelling as resistance and research as a form of world-making.

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Welcome to The Wanderlust Threader.