Welcome! I am a geographer and political ecologist, an Assistant Professor at the School of World Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University.
My book Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century (University of Minnesota Press 2022) examines 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 research, I also research infrastructure policing and security, radical and socialist responses to planetary ecological crisis, the politics of humor in environmentalist memes. I am currently working on a new project examining socio-spatial attachments that form around underground spaces in environmental controversies.
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: A Radical Journal of Geography, The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and the edited volumes 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 account.
My book Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century (University of Minnesota Press 2022) examines 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 research, I also research infrastructure policing and security, radical and socialist responses to planetary ecological crisis, the politics of humor in environmentalist memes. I am currently working on a new project examining socio-spatial attachments that form around underground spaces in environmental controversies.
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: A Radical Journal of Geography, The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and the edited volumes 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 account.
