RESEARCH
What kinds of social relations can sustain a just transition away from fossil fuels and extractive relationships with the Earth? My research focuses on the role of colonial juridical practices in producing environmental violence and the conditions of its intelligibility. I am interested in anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and abolitionist movement building and critique in the face of rising ecological crises. My work is grounded in a commitment to building respectful and accountable solidarities with the communities with whom I collaborate.
BOOK
My first book project, Patchwork: Land, Law, and Extraction in Greater Chaco, is a study of oil and gas extraction and energy futures in New Mexico. It draws on several years of archival and ethnographic research done in collaboration with Diné communities living a jurisdictionally complex space in the heart of a recent fracking boom near Chaco Canyon. My ethnography weaves between the practices of settler land management that enable extraction and the lived effects of fracking among my collaborators. The book attends to the everyday labor of Diné citizens, environmentalists, and government agencies as they contend with the scale and scope of overlapping authorities across the region’s “checkerboard” landscape. I argue that settler jurisdiction sustains a profoundly confusing organization of knowledge that gets in the way of accounting for extraction’s cumulative harms. The book diagnoses a jurisdictional imaginary that pervades the American settler colonial present and that has significant consequences for Indigenous lands and global ecologies. This imaginary, which I call “patchwork”, comprises spatial, affective, and epistemic practices through which land is imagined and managed as resource and property. By focusing on the routine practices through which settler colonial power is reproduced in the regulation of an extractive industry, this work contributes an anti-colonial approach to the study of environmental in/justice.
I am developing research for a second book project — tentatively titled Trans/Climate — that examines the gendered and racialized politics of energy transitions in New Mexico. This work asks: How does extraction produce and police normative subjectivity and relationality? What ways of being are practiced and asserted through frontline resistance to extraction and technofacism? I consider a range of techniques — AI, carbon capture, hydrogen, fracking — as they interface with infrastructures of everyday life. This research explores existing and emergent solidarities across movements for climate and environmental justice with struggles for queer and trans liberation, migrant justice, and abolition of carceral systems.
DIGITAL PROJECTS
San Joaquin Marsh Archive: This project explores the responsibilities that land grant universities have towards Indigenous Peoples through an archival exploration of the San Joaquin Marsh Reserve at the University of California, Irvine, on Acjachemen and Tongva homelands. We have carefully digitized hundreds of documents about the marsh’s history and management, which we are working to make publicly available. With Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples (Gabriella Lassos, Ciara Belardes), the Research Justice Shop, CLIMATE Justice Initiative, Stephanie Martinez, and Christina Marsh.
Environmental Justice for Torreon: Mario Atencio, Leola Paquin, Lani Tsinnajinnie, Torreon Community Alliance, and I are developing a community-controlled digital archive and oral history repository about the fight to protect Eastern Diné lands from extraction.