I鈥檓 a cultural anthropologist and earned my Ph.D. in anthropology from CU-Boulder. I like to think that by now I鈥檝e also earned an honorary degree as a coffee-ologist, having worked or researched in just about every part of the coffee commodity chain. I did most of my dissertation fieldwork in Costa Rica, where I looked at how the Costa Rican sense of self as exceptional has been challenged both by the decline of coffee production and the decline of the social welfare state. I鈥檝e also done research at coffee conferences in the U.S. and Guatemala, with baristas and coffeeshop owners, and on social networks to understand how ideas about quality and social justice circulate and are made sense of. When I鈥檓 not teaching about coffee, social justice, Latin America, power, violence, and the state, you can find me obsessing over water-to-grounds ratios or training for triathlons.
