Welcome!
I am the Professor and Director of the School of Environment and Sustainability in the School of Environment and Sustainability at UC. As a feminist political ecologist and interdisciplinary social scientist, I partner with communities to support how Indigenous Peoples, Traditional Peoples, and Local Communities’ livelihoods and well-being can be sustained and to identify the pathways that shape just futures. I specialize in collaborative, transdisciplinary projects and creating mixed methods qualitative teams. I work in multiple modalities and mediums, and value digital humanities labs and critical digital and design spaces for engagement.
I joined the University of Cincinnati Faculty in 2024 after serving as a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University from 2009-2024.
My work focuses on the intersections of the environment, media, and power. Using a feminist political ecology framework, I map out historical and spatial inequalities and injustices and highlight pathways for self-determination and sovereignty in the context of acute change.
In all of my work I stitch together insights from engaged anthropology and visual works to create collaborative projects. In addition to environmental anthropology, I find kinship with decolonizing approaches to research inquiry alongside insights from discard studies, anthropology of climate change, cultural geography, Indigenous studies, and Latin American studies.
I have partnered with the Mebêngôkre-Kayapó Peoples, an Indigenous community in Brazil, and am currently working on team-based and community-driven projects around the United States, in Latin America, and throughout the globe on environmental justice, soundscape ecologies, media sovereignty, digital well-being, and community resilience.
I am dedicated to opening and transforming the academy and providing undergraduate and graduate students fruitful and productive experiences to thrive in the multicultural and interconnected world in which they live and work. In order to better support students, I have completed IMPACT and SAFE Zone training, regularly mentor student researchers, and have advised community-collaborative partnerships and immersion programs on campus and abroad.
Land Acknowledgement
The Cincinnati area and the land that the University of Cincinnati has been built on is the Native homeland of the Indigenous Algonquian-speaking Peoples, including the Delaware, Miami, and Shawnee Peoples. We pay our respects to the Ancestors, Elders, and relatives/relations past, present and, emerging. Learn More.
Resources: Are you Planning to do a Land Acknowledgement post, other resources on territorial acknowledgements, and the American Indian College Fund.
Specializations
Feminist Political Ecology + Sustainability| Environmental Justice | Collaborative Research and Praxis | Media Ecologies | Indigenous Activism and Rights | Visual and Digital Anthropology | Critical Data Studies
Learn more
University of Cincinnati School of Environment and Sustainability SEaS
American Anthropological Association
Anthropology and Environment Society
Association of American Geographers
Center for World Indigenous Studies
IUCN Commission on Environmental, Economic, and Social Policy
Native American and Indigenous Studies Association
Society for Visual Anthropology
