I am an environmental anthropologist, Dean’s Assistant Professor of Environment & Society and Anthropology at Brown University, and a former sustainable energy policy practitioner.
I conduct ethnographic research on solar energy deployment, forestry, and agricultural land stewardship in both urban and rural communities of color in the United States. I look closely at the pragmatic and often mundane practices through which foresters, farmers, white-collar clean energy experts, blue-collar solar energy installers, and environmental justice activists address a range of environmental problems in ways that complicate dominant ideological paradigms. I show, for instance, how their decolonial land restoration strategies and energy democracy cooperatives take form through land enclosures, mining industries, and fossil fuels, troubling the normative political distinctions between socialism and neoliberalism, decarbonization and extractivism, collectivism and individualism.
I pursue this work out of a conviction that environmental policy, organizing, and research are far more effective when they focus less on abstract idealizations of sustainability and more on how people actually make sense of and respond to environmental problems under the structural constraints of their day-to-day lives.
My research has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Wend Collective.
My scholarly and teaching interests include the anthropology of energy, the co-production of race and nature, multispecies ethnography, climate justice and environmental justice, science and technology studies, affect theory, and the epistemological politics of climate mitigation efforts.
I hold a B.A. in Development Studies from Brown University and a Ph.D in environmental anthropology from Yale University. My research and scholarly objectives are informed by my experience as a sustainable energy practitioner and advocate in New York for eight years prior to beginning my Ph.D.