Research

My research combines sociological, anticolonial, Black and Indigenous studies, and critical environmental justice approaches to questions of race, slavery, colonialism, and environment in the modern world. I am also interested in the politics of knowledge as relates to racial and environmental issues. Using comparative, historical, ethnographic, spatial, and visual methods, my primary area of scholarship examines the ways that racialization patterns human relations to environments, land, and nonhuman forms of nature. Thus far, my work has received support from the National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Superfund Research Program, the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, the University of Pittsburgh Department of Sociology, and the University of Pittsburgh Community-Engaged Scholarship Forum.

I am currently working on my first book project, titled The Plantation Problem: An Inquiry into the Environmental Significance of Race, which points to the limits of prevailing modes of thinking about race and environment that are mired by colonial unknowing—mainly, onto-epistemological assumptions about race that deflect attention from the ongoing significance of colonial/imperial domination. In this book, by contrast, i attend to Rhode Island’s colonial present and past, to shed light on the environmental significance of race with an anticolonial mode of inquiry that is contextual, relational, and perspectival. The Plantation Problem situates contemporary manifestations of racialized environmental inequality within the historical context of European conquest, whereby the plantation, as colonial settlement and industrialized-agricultural estate, emerges as an important site for inquiry that recasts the socioecological import of whiteness, blackness, and indigeneity in relationality. Importantly, by engaging with social analysts associated with Black studies and Indigenous studies—from W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Sylvia Wynter to Glen Sean Coulthard, V.F. Cordova, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson—this book foregrounds the concerns, experiences, categories, and perceptions of the colonially subjugated to rethink race and environment from subaltern perspectives. I have published early iterations of this project in the journals Environmental Sociology, Political Power and Social Theory, and The Journal of World-Systems Research.