My research is centrally concerned with environmental knowledges and the uneven distribution of harms from fossil fuel extraction and climate change. I am interested in how knowledge about the environment is produced, whose knowledge drives different kinds of action, and how environmental problems are defined and scaled. I focus on the role of colonial juridical practices in producing environmental violence and the conditions of its intelligibility, and I am interested in anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and abolitionist movement building and critique in the face of rising ecological crises.
CURRENT RESEARCH
My current book project, Patchwork: Land, Law, and Extraction in Greater Chaco, is a study of oil and gas extraction and energy futures in the Greater Chaco Landscape 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. The book is ultimately concerned with how settler jurisdictional regimes get in the way of accounting for and addressing the multiple and cumulative harms of extraction, which colonial governments themselves authorize. Illustrating how state forms of environmental management sideline Indigenous land relations, the book also highlights tactics that Diné communities employ to keep their jurisdictional claims and land relations alive.
I am currently working on several projects across community-based archival practices, environmental justice, critical race and Indigenous studies, and queer and transgender studies. For example, with Mario Atencio, Leola Paquin, and Lani Tsinnajinnie, I am building a digital archive of the Indigenous-led fight to protect Eastern Diné lands from extraction while documenting community knowledge of climate change.
My newer 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.
