I am an environmental anthropologist, Dean’s Associate Professor of Environment & Society and Anthropology at Brown University, and a former sustainable energy policy practitioner. I am also currently the Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Brown University.
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 and Jamaica. Through this work, I show how equity-oriented decarbonization and climate resiliency efforts paradoxically reproduce the very formations of structural power that they are supposed to supplant: extractivism, land enclosures, and labor exploitation. But this analysis is not an indictment of the solar energy campaigns, ecological restoration projects, and farming communities that I partner with through close ethnographic engagement. Instead, I show that on-the-ground work for climate justice is often less about achieving utopic ideals of sustainability and equity, and more about strategically navigating the everyday contradictions of environmental governance in an extractive settler colony and throughout the Black diaspora.
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, climate justice and environmental justice, the co-production of race and nature, multispecies ethnography, science and technology studies, affect theory, and the politics of climate knowledge production.
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.