My research examines environmental knowledges, administrative violence, and the uneven distribution of harms from fossil fuel extraction and climate change. In conversation with social movement actors, I identify political relations that contribute to marginalization, and I elucidate existing and emergent practices that aim to build more just futures in the face of a rapidly changing climate.
CURRENT RESEARCH
Book: Patchwork
My current book project, Patchwork: Land, Law, and Extraction in Greater Chaco, is a study of oil and gas extraction in the Greater Chaco region of northwestern New Mexico. It draws on over two years of archival and ethnographic research and ongoing collaboration with Diné communities living in a jurisdictionally complex space just east of the Navajo Reservation and in the heart of a recent fracking boom near Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Tracing the managerial practices that enable extraction and the lived effects of fracking, the book illustrates how state forms of environmental management sideline Indigenous land relations, and explores tactics that Diné communities employ to keep their jurisdictional claims and land relations alive. My ethnography attends to the everyday labor of Diné citizens, environmentalists, and government agencies as they work out the scale and scope of authority across the region’s “checkerboard” landscape. I argue that settler jurisdictional regimes get in the way of accounting for extraction’s cumulative harms as they occur in time. This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University of Chicago Social Sciences Division, and the Center for Engaged Scholarship.
Trans/Climate
My current research looks at the relationship between extractivism and the production and policing of sexed and gendered normativity in the United States, through an examination of imbricated processes of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, science, and law. Through archival research and collaborations with queer, trans, and two-spirit activists, this work aims to draw out solidarities between movements for climate and environmental justice, and struggles for queer and trans liberation.
PAST PROJECTS
“GBA+” in Canadian infrastructure and extraction projects
I collaborated the project “Queers, closets, and man camps" led by the Westwood Lab at Dalhousie University. This research looked at if and how the views of 2SLGBTQQIA+ people are being considered in Impact Assessment processes under the 2019 Canadian Impact Assessment Act (IAA), as part of the government’s “Gender Based Analysis Plus (GBA+)” mandate.