Taboo Markets and Contested Commodities
Good Kids: The Politics of Child Labor in the Global South.
Stanford University Press (2025).
One in ten children worldwide is involved in some form of child labor. While almost half are in occupations that put their safety at risk, the other half have "gray" jobs like farming or selling candy on the street. Children in these positions often defend the value of their work, and some even join social movements to demand the legalization of child labor. This book reveals how global campaigns against child labor are often met with resistance from the very children they are meant to protect. Conducting interviews in Bolivia and Ecuador with children who defend their work, I explore how children give work moral, not just economic, value. I find that working children seek a sense of self-worth, as well as worthiness in their closest relationships; they use work to prove that they are "good sons/daughters," "good friends," or simply "good kids." Drawing, also, on interviews with reformers invested in ending child labor, I identify the ways that global campaigns can, unintentionally, undermine these relationships and make working children feel stigmatized rather than protected. This book reveals the role that recognition and stigma play in sustaining taboo transactions and upends simple understandings of harm and worthiness in a vast but poorly understood labor market.
Performative Absolution in Morally Contested Markets: How Child Street Vendors Sell their Work
Under review
This paper examines how child street vendors convince reluctant strangers to buy their products, despite the social stigma of supporting child labor. Drawing on 58 interviews with working children in Bolivia and Ecuador, I discuss the strategies that actors in taboo markets use to manage their audience’s emotions and impressions, how they try to assuage feelings of guilt and shame. I develop the concepts of “palatability work” and “performative absolution” to explain how children make a taboo transaction, at least momentarily, seem fair or compassionate. These efforts, I find, help maintain a harmful market but also allow children to cope with their immediate vulnerability. I discuss implications for economic and cultural sociology, as well as policymakers and child rights advocates.
Sugar Babies: Adolescent Motherhood and the Markets of Intimacy
In progress
Extending these interests, I am now developing a second project on taboo markets in the global South, shifting focus from the ‘visible poor’ – children working on the streets – to the ‘invisible poor’ – adolescent mothers working in private and digital spaces. Underage pregnancy is on the rise in Latin America and the Caribbean. Research suggests that gray markets in transactional intimacy are expanding as well. In a project tentatively called Sugar Babies: Adolescent Motherhood and the Markets of Intimacy, I will explore how youth, sex, and affection become contested commodities among adolescent girls, specifically the doubly vulnerable adolescent mothers who engage in ‘sugar’ relationships to navigate extreme poverty. This study asks how young mothers in the Global South negotiate the boundaries between transactional intimacy and maternal care. Drawing on life-history interviews and digital ethnography, I will examine the economic strategies these girls use to transform ‘dirty money’ into ‘sacred’ maternal provision. I aim to provide critical insights for both sociological theory and social policy on adolescent and child welfare. I plan to identify how, exactly, this taboo market connects with broader patterns of gendered and social inequality
Child Protection and Children’s Rights
Ending violence against children: A new international standard to foster data availability. With Claudia Cappa and Roberta Cecchetti.
Child Abuse & Neglect (2023) 144: 1-22.
Interest in data on violence against children has been gathering momentum in recent years. Nevertheless, data collection efforts overall are sporadic and national data systems remain underdeveloped. What is more, definitions of violence are inconsistent and unclear. What ‘counts’ as violence against children varies across data collection efforts, negatively impacting data quality. Significant investment – in the form of guidance as well as tools and other resources for capacity-building – is urgently required to respond to countries' data needs. The newly released International Classification of Violence against Children (ICVAC) holds potential for bringing the world one step closer to filling data gaps and thus promoting accountability towards the ambitious global goal of ending violence against children.
COVID-19 and violence against children: A review of early studies. With Claudia Cappa.
Child Abuse & Neglect (2021) 116.2: 1-9.
Throughout the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers across the globe have attempted to understand how the health and socioeconomic crisis brought about by the coronavirus is affecting children’s exposure to violence. Since containment measures have disrupted many data collection and research efforts, studies have had to rely on existing data or design new approaches to gathering relevant information. This article reviews the literature that has been produced on children’s exposure to violence during the pandemic to understand emerging patterns and critically appraise methodologies to help inform the design of future studies. The study entailed a search of working papers, technical reports, and journal articles. The search used a combination of search terms to identify relevant articles and reports published between March 1 and December 31, 2020. The sources were assessed according to scope and study design. The review identified 48 recent working papers, technical reports, and journal articles on the impact of COVID-19 on violence against children. In terms of scope and methods, the review led to three main findings: 1) Studies have focused on physical or psychological violence at home and less attention has been paid to other forms of violence against children, 2) most studies have relied on administrative records, while other data sources, such as surveys or big data, were less commonly employed, and 3) different definitions and study designs were used to gather data directly, resulting in findings that are hardly generalizable. With respect to children’s experience of violence, the review led to four main findings: 1) Studies found a decrease in police reports and referrals to child protective services, 2) mixed results were found with respect to the number of calls to police or domestic violence helplines, 3) articles showed an increase in child abuse-related injuries treated in hospitals, and 4) surveys reported an increase in family violence. This review underscores the persistent challenges affecting the availability and quality of data on violence against children, including the absence of standards for measuring this sensitive issue as well as the limited availability of baseline data. Future research on COVID-19 and violence against children should address some of the gaps identified in this review.
The priceless child talks back: How working children respond to global norms against child labor.
Childhood (2020) 27.1:63-77.
This article examines how working children understand the morality of child labor. Drawing on interviews with children in Bolivia and Ecuador, I find that children call child labor moral when it helps them manage their social ties. Working children do not think of themselves as individuals needing care (per international organizations like the International Labor Organization) or as a cultural group needing recognition (per the “working children’s movements”). Rather, children describe themselves as morally upright members of intimate networks. I conclude by introducing the concept of relational dignity.
Globalization and Cultural Translation
Theorizing Cultural Friction: How the Relationship between Cultural Products and Local Environments Shapes Localization Processes. Co-author: Tamara Kay.
American Journal of Cultural Sociology (2026)
How do different types of culture spread around the world? Do norms travel much like technologies? Do media and commodities diffuse in different ways? Surprisingly, research on cultural diffusion cannot yet answer these questions. Most scholars examine the spread of only one cultural object or class of object at a time. While this can tell us much about the actors, networks, and institutions involved, it tells us little about the objects themselves. In this article, we employ a comparative approach to show how cultural objects vary, specifically how they meet different kinds of resistance in the new environments they enter. This resistance, we argue, generates different kinds of “cultural friction” which shape the strategies actors use to successfully adopt and adapt a cultural object. We propose a theoretical model based on two types of friction—normative and relational—and their relationship to four adaptation strategies—value construction, alliance building, customization, and resource exchange. We demonstrate the plausibility of our model with four empirical cases: child labor norms, the Project ECHO telementoring model, Sesame Street programs, and Sesame Street branded toys.
Toward a Hermeneutic Model of Cultural Globalization: Four Lessons from Translation Studies.
Sociological Theory (2019) 37.2: 142-161.
Many scholars study how actors adapt global culture in the local context, how they make globally-circulating objects, narratives, and norms intelligible for local audiences. However, most of this research focuses on the actors’ “cultural matching” or “congruence building” strategies, it doesn’t consider actors’ interpretive work. In this paper, I argue that globalization research needs to take culture and interpretation more seriously and, to do so, would benefit from a conversation with translation theory. Specifically, translation theory shows us how actors’ interpretive work is shaped by (1) how they imagine their dual roles; (2) how they imagine different parts of the world; (3) how they imagine a text’s intertextuality; and (4) how their audience imagines the foreign Other. I conclude by bringing these lessons together and laying the groundwork for a hermeneutic approach to cultural globalization.
The Universal King? Memory, Globalization, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Sociological Inquiry (2018) 88.1: 79-105.
This article examines how Martin Luther King, Jr. is remembered and represented by journalists in Ghana, South Africa, and Mexico, looking at coverage of “critical discourse moments” from King's life and legacy (1963–2016). I argue that representations of King vary in terms of local resonance—how well foreign figures or events align with local myths, values, and expectations—and global salience—the perceived world historical importance of a past figure or event. I then propose a new typology of global memory reception.
The Moral Glocalization of Sport: Local Meanings of Football in Chota Valley, Ecuador.
International Review for the Sociology of Sport (2015) 52.1: 82-96.
Studies of the glocalization of sport usually focus on ‘aesthetic glocalization’(how local actors adopt a global sport and create a new hybrid aesthetic). This has led some critics to dismiss glocalization as a superficial ‘façade’of diversity hiding global homogeneity. This paper challenges this view by looking at the ‘moral glocalization’of sport and at the ways local actors give global sports local moral meanings. Drawing on interviews with Afro-descendants from Chota valley, Ecuador, it shows that in this peripheral community football is seen as:(1) a morally safe emotional outlet;(2) a moral education;(3) a source of national ‘communitas’;(4) racial pride;(5) a space for local moral heroes; and (6) a gateway to communal progress. In conclusion, local actors give global football deep moral meaning when they can associate it to local conceptions of the sacred.
The Glocalization of Time and Space: Soccer and Meaning in Chota Valley, Ecuador.
International Sociology (2013) 28.4: 373-390.
Globalization is commonly defined as time–space compression, a view that relies on an idea of ‘empty’time and space where these dimensions have been stripped of local meanings by abstraction and standardization. This notion is incompatible with the globalization of culture literature that suggests that these processes do not erase local meanings but rather mix local and global culture in a process Roland Robertson calls ‘glocalization.’However, glocalization research tends to look at culture within the bounds of time and space, without problematizing changes to these dimensions themselves. By examining the local appropriation of global soccer (football) in a rural Ecuadorian community called Chota, this article bridges these perspectives and shows that globalization actively reconfigures the meanings associated to time and space.
Latin America
Is Civil Society Dangerous for Democracy? New Directions for Civil Sphere Theory in Latin America.
The Civil Sphere in Latin America (2018) Jeffrey C. Alexander and Carlo Tognato (eds).
This chapter is a commentary on the book The Civil Sphere in Latin America. I argue that the book proves how useful Civil Sphere Theory is for Latin American studies, as it provides a more sophisticated definition of the civil sphere and a new set of theoretical tools.