bio

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I think of play and leisure as fundamental dimensions of human experience. How, where, and with whom we play expresses a good part of who we are, and of the inequalities that run through our lives.

I’m a technician in Leisure-Time Education and Recreation from the Universidad Católica del Uruguay, a sociologist, and I hold a master’s in Information and Communication from the Universidad de la República, along with a postgraduate diploma in Social and Political Anthropology from FLACSO Argentina. I’m currently doing my PhD in Leisure, Culture and Communication for Human Development at the University of Deusto (Bilbao). I’m on the faculty of the Universidad Católica del Uruguay, where I teach in the BA in Educational Recreation and mentor students training to use play as an educational and social tool.

I like to think about how I work through the figure of the bricoleur, as Lévi-Strauss describes it: someone who doesn’t start from tools designed for a single purpose, but works with whatever is at hand, recombining pieces from different origins to build something new. My path through recreation, sociology, communication, and anthropology works the same way — a mixed toolkit I draw on for each problem. That same logic runs through my research, where I combine life-story accounts, ethnographic fieldwork, and structural analysis to understand play in its singularity and in its social conditions. And that’s not a coincidence: playing, too, is often a form of bricolage.

My work sits at the crossroads of Leisure Studies and Play Studies. I’m especially interested in the biographical dimension of play experiences: what we play throughout our lives, what we were and weren’t able to play, and how that relates to social class, territory, and institutions. From there I work on topics like play inequality, the right to play, educational leisure in settings of confinement, public recreational spaces, and the political socialization of young people.

I’ve published in academic journals and books across Latin America and Europe, and I combine research with teaching and work alongside educational and community organizations.

I live and work in Montevideo. If you’d like to talk about play, leisure, recreation, or research, get in touch.