Current Research Projects
Evasion
This is a study of clerical sexual abuse in Latin America. While the topic is tragically expansive, with new scandals emerging throughout the region, this book project focuses on U.S. priests who moved (or were moved) to Latin America to evade suspicion and, at times, prosecution. The project centers on multiple instances of priests moving from the United States to Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Belize. Given that clerical sexual abuse is a criminal offense, today’s growing literature understandably maintains a nationalist framework hitched to domestic matters of church and state. In contrast, this research opens a window onto transnational strategies of evasion by connecting the United States to Central America and the Vatican. It is a book that builds on a sustained research collective founded and directed by Professor O’Neill: the Evasion Lab. Committed to thinking the underside of surveillance, the Evasion Lab focused on the themes of data, law, and finance—to consider how institutions and individuals (for better, for worse) make themselves illegible and thus ungovernable.
Traffic
The population of Guatemala City continues to grow, but its infrastructure has been frozen for decades. Traffic has never been worse. This book project engages Guatemala City from the perspective of traffic to realign conversations on security, mobility, and infrastructure in Latin America, with an interest in assessing circulation as a metric of security. It is a book project that dovetails with an ongoing research collaboration between the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, the Latin American and Caribbean Centre at the London School of Economics, the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios sobre Desarrollo at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia.
