Sofia Vidotto is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) at Tulane University. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Brown University (2026). Her research focuses on state–society relations in contexts of inequality, with a particular interest in how socially grounded actors and social knowledge can shape state responsiveness. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods, she studies how bureaucracies, social movements, and local intermediaries connect marginalized communities to the state and influence the provision of public goods and political engagement. As part of this research agenda, her dissertation examines the consequences of incorporating social movement activists into the senior bureaucracy for the provision of public goods and citizens’ trust in state officials in Argentine slums.