Welcome! I am a geographer and political ecologist, and an Associate Professor at the School of World Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University. For the past five years, I have been conducting a comparative ethnographic project examining how people come to interface with and care for underground spaces, particularly with regard to oil and gas infrastructure. I'm currently writing this work up into a book project provisionally entitled Protectors of the Subsurface: Militant Investigation and Critical Imagination in Anti-Oil Activism. This and other themes of my research can be explored at the above tabs.
My first book Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century (University of Minnesota Press 2022) examined pipeline opposition movements in the central United States and the ways in which they have transformed the politics of climate justice. This research intervenes in debates in the theoretical social sciences concerning populism and democracy in relation to oil and infrastructure politics, race and racism, and settler colonialism. I argue that while a form of environmental populism challenges the climate movement's history of elitism, it also remakes hierarchies of race, class, and nation to compose its political subjects. This research project forms part of my broader interest in affect and emotion, radical politics, and materialism, as well as the importance of understanding the ways in which space, ecology, and nature are enrolled in social projects of oppression or liberation.
In addition to the above, I have also published research concerning affects and infrastructure, pipeline security and policing, and the politics of humor in environmentalist memes and in cave writing.
I hold a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Macalester College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Minnesota. I have published in the journals Political Geography, cultural geographies, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Antipode, Dialogues in Human Geography, Progress in Human Geography, Emotion, Space, and Society, The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and the edited volumes Settling the Boom, Museum Activism, and A Place More Void.
This website offers some insight into current research interests and activities. For more frequently updated content, please follow my twitter or bluesky accounts.
My first book Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century (University of Minnesota Press 2022) examined pipeline opposition movements in the central United States and the ways in which they have transformed the politics of climate justice. This research intervenes in debates in the theoretical social sciences concerning populism and democracy in relation to oil and infrastructure politics, race and racism, and settler colonialism. I argue that while a form of environmental populism challenges the climate movement's history of elitism, it also remakes hierarchies of race, class, and nation to compose its political subjects. This research project forms part of my broader interest in affect and emotion, radical politics, and materialism, as well as the importance of understanding the ways in which space, ecology, and nature are enrolled in social projects of oppression or liberation.
In addition to the above, I have also published research concerning affects and infrastructure, pipeline security and policing, and the politics of humor in environmentalist memes and in cave writing.
I hold a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Macalester College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Minnesota. I have published in the journals Political Geography, cultural geographies, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Antipode, Dialogues in Human Geography, Progress in Human Geography, Emotion, Space, and Society, The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and the edited volumes Settling the Boom, Museum Activism, and A Place More Void.
This website offers some insight into current research interests and activities. For more frequently updated content, please follow my twitter or bluesky accounts.
